Ever since I was a child and my mother occasionally made thick syrupy, concentrated lemonade --which I didn’t particularly love-- I had never tried to make my own. When my dear friend Barbara Abdeni Massaad visited us in Kea and saw our lemon trees brimming with fruit, she pointed me to a very different lemonade recipe…

First and foremost this lemonade is not boiled, like my mother’s, and so retains its fresh fruity flavor. In her beautiful, extensively researched and documented book Mouneh: Preserving Foods for the Lebanese Pantry, Barbara writes that she got the recipe for the ‘out of this world’ lemonade from Dolly Shammah, a Syrian lady originally from Aleppo.

Sliced, drizzled with olive oil and roasted in the oven, our delicious lemons add tartness and aroma to the sweet fennel from the garden. Together they become an irresistible treat…

I took out the last fennel bulbs, some large, others not fully grown, yet starting to bloom. Our two trees are still brimming with large and beautiful lemons which I have to use up, store and preserve as the days get warmer. Soon we won’t have any more juicy fresh lemons, so I have to freeze as much juice as I can, and of course made more lemon curd and marmalade. I will also plan to make the unusual lemonade my friend Barbara Abdeni-Massad has in her spectacular book Mouneh: Preserving Foods for the Lebanese Pantry; I hope I will post my version of her lemonade soon.

Inspired by the exquisite “tasty, bite size, fruit candy” my friend June Taylor--the marmalade-maker par excellence— makes.

Trying to take advantage of our fragrant, thick-skinned lemons, I took the time and candied some lemon and Seville orange peels, after tasting June’s treats. I posted a recipe, the result of my very first try following the Greek way for making ‘spoon sweets.’ The peels were good, somewhat chewy, but nothing like the tender and fragrant citrus triangles June makes.

With plenty of eggs from our neighbor’s hens, I decided to cook a lot because what I like most is pickled huevos haminados, which are simply delicious!

Sephardic Jews who live in Salonika, and all around the Mediterranean, prepare huevos haminados (baked eggs) as they were called in Ladino, the dialect of the Jews who were expelled from Spain. Prepared on Fridays to serve on the Sabbath, they were originally placed in a covered clay pot filled with onion skins and water and baked in a communal oven, hence the name. Later, the eggs were simmered for hours on top of the stove. The onion skins darken the white shells and give the eggs a distinctive flavor and creamy texture.