Lemon Marmalade from Gleaned Lemons

My first article in the Fullerton Observer was about gleaning: gathering leftover crops (or forlorn backyard fruit) to reduce waste and feed ourselves. After my granddad Tom read the article, he sent me a short note of grandpa praise and mentioned that gleaning was a biblical term and the act of gleaning was something that came up more than once in that Good Book. I was raised a Catholic, and Catholics don’t read the bible, so this was news to me. Upon further investigation, I found this passage:

Leviticus 23:22:

And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger.

Pretty straightforward, eh? If you’ve got a lot, you can spare a little for those who have less.

I separate gleaning into a couple of categories: the large-ish organized operation that rescues otherwise wasted food and distributes it to those who need it (more biblical), and the self-serving, recreational kind (more hedonistic). Thus far, I’ve mostly participated in the latter.

I gathered some fruit on the island — figs and plums and blackberries and such. I love the treasure-hunt-ish-ness of it all. Seeking out the perfect berry patch or serendipitously falling on a pear tree and coming back week-to-week to check on its progress. One might think that Orange County isn’t the place for such things, but in fact, there’s a surprising bounty of delicious fruits just crying out to be picked. Just here in my neighborhood, there are avocados, grapes, all kinds of citrus, plums, apricots, apples, figs, guavas, pomegranates, and persimmons.

A friend, Rory, passed on a map he started of some good picking sites in Fullerton. You can visit his version here. Or, I’ve added his entries to some of my own on the Good Food OC map.

Yesterday was my first time foraging in the suburban jungle. A family friend, Lynne, who’s well-apprised of my crazy food tendencies, invited me and my mum to go pick a friend’s Meyer Lemon tree. We got more than 50 lbs and left plenty of ripe and ripening fruit. It was fun.

My pretty mom picking lemons.

Lynne putting a few into the basket, and the haul, back at home.

Later, mum squeezed a bunch for lemonade. Then we made a batch of ridiculously delicious lemon marmalade. The entire house smelled like lemon drops for the rest of the day.

It’s a wonderful recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes. You can get her step-by-step instructions here. All it takes is lemons, water, and sugar in a 1:1:1 ratio.

It’s a two-step cooking process, and then there’s the canning… in all, it took us about 2.5 hours to make 10 jars 8oz jars of jam.

First you prep the lemons…

Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum!

Sites to check out about gleaning:

• Neighborhood Fruit — A site to help find and share fruit locally on public and private land — over 10,000 trees registered.
• Fallen Fruit — An activist art project dedicated to public fruit gleaning and sharing. They do exhibits, public action and mapping public fruit in the LA area.
• Second Harvest Food Bank Gleaning Volunteers — Orange County Food Bank that grows food on donated land and uses volunteers to help harvest; also does gleaning of commercial operations, though it’s more rare since there aren’t so many local farms anymore.
• How-to Guide to Setting up a Gleaning Project from Relocalize.net
• Society of St. Andrew – Huge church-based gleaning network that distributed over 12 million pounds of fresh produce in 2008.