What to do when life gives you lemons?

Make lemon curd of course!
As part of my quest to find healthy and delicious recipes, and to rid my kitchen of processed food, I've decided to post one recipe a week that has no processed food and is made with organic ingredients when ever possible. My first recipe is lemon curd.

Last week my sister shared her bumper crop of lemons with me, and I decided to make some lemon curd. I had never made it before, so I searched the internet for recipes and came up with this one. I liked that all the ingredients were mixed at the beginning, and that the egg wasn't added after it was heated. For the most part, I used a recipe from allrecipes.com as a guide, and here is what I came up with.

Fresh Lemon Curd

Ingredients:
3 eggs + 1 yolk (i took all the white squiggly things off the yolks)
1 cup of sugar
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (4 med. size lemons)
1 TBL grated lemon peel
1/4 cup of butter, melted

Directions:
1. In a heatproof bowl use a whisk to beat the eggs until the whites and yolks are combined.
2. Add the sugar and combine with the eggs.
3. Add the lemon juice, zest, & butter and combine with the egg and sugar mixture.
4. After all the ingredients are thoroughly combined, sit the bowl over a pan* of gently simmering water, making sure the water is not touching the bottom of the bowl.
5. Continue to stir with a whisk for 15 minutes. The lemon curd will start to thicken around 5 mins. into the cooking, but I cooked it the entire 15 mins. because of the raw eggs.
6. Remove the lemon curd from the heat and set aside to cool, stirring occasionally to keep a skin from forming over the top.
7. Once cooled, spoon the lemon curd into containers and refrigerate until ready to use.

Step 1 photo:

Oops, there is no lemon zest here, it is my second batch and the lemon skins were too soft to get the zest from them,

so I did without. It didn't have as tart a flavor as the first batch did. I preferred the zest : )

Step 4 photo:

Step 5 photo:

It is starting to coat the sides of the bowl and is getting air bubbles.



Step 7 photo:

This recipe made three 4 ounce containers and a wee bit left over for me to enjoy : )

 This is my second batch and I still have some in refrigerator from the first,

so I put it in plastic containers to see how it holds up in the freezer. I'll update if it works out.

P.S. I made thumbprint cookies to fill with the lemon curd. They were delicious, but they were too rich to pair with the richness of the lemon curd. Eventhough they were tasty, I wouldn't pair them up again, that is why I didn't include the recipe.

*This is what I used to cook my lemon curd. It is a makeshift double boiler, but it got the job done.

Test to be sure that the bowl doesn't touch the water. Do this by adding 1/2 inch of water to the pan and setting the bowl in it.

Check the bottom of the bowl to see if it is wet. If it is wet, the bowl is sitting too low so you will need a wider bowl.

I really enjoyed making this recipe, and the delicious lemon curd that it made, I hope you will too!

These are my favorite photos this week, so I'm hooking up with Texture Tuesday...this Tuesday is the first Tuesday of the month which means it's 'Not Necessarily Texture Tuesday'! Basically this allows you to link up any fav photo you like... textured or not, processed or not... anything goes.... Just share your most recent fav photo with the TT community.

I can't wait to see what everyone else has come up with!

I'm also linking up with...