Preserving the goodness

Every Christmas season, we are lucky enough to gain a few jars of Louisiana fruit preserves from Drue's relatives. This year, we were able to pick from his mom's collection (anything but the Mayhaw) of strawberry, blueberry and Uncle Mike's Sunquat preserves. By far, Drue is more partial to preserves than me, but the thought that some illustrious or novel fruit was canned for our later pleasure is really cool.

Our annual pilgrimage to Jesuit Bend for the 40 pound box of satsumas resulted in our first canning project. After squeezing a ton of them for straight up juice and cocktails and noshing on enough to ward off any illness (or not), there were many of the tiny orange sunbursts left. We headed to the Harry's Ace Hardware on Magazine for a dozen quilted canning jars and tried our hand at preserving a few weeks of Louisiana fall.

They, paired with the Lemoncello and Satsumacello, we'd been steeping, and homemade vanilla extract, filled out our homemade Christmas presents.

While home in Basile at Drue's folks for Christmas, his nephew Mattox picked several hundred kumquats, which we made into marmalade, stuffed the New Year's turkey with and ate our fair share. We're thinking candied kumquats next. There's still plenty left. What else what you recommend using all these kumquats for?

Then there's the haul of pink grapefruits off our friend Michael's tree up in the Irish Channel.