lemony lemony | agar agar and tapioca

heron61 once posted about making a Shaker lemon pie. It looked and sounded quite good, so I looked up a vegan version of the pie. It sat in my bookmarks for quite some time, eventually being joined by two recipes for lemon tarts.

While grocery shopping a few weeks ago, there were very nice-looking organic lemons, so I bought a small bag of them, thinking I'd finally make that pie and maybe a tart too.

(I could also try making my own Moroccan Preserved Lemons.)

After buying the lemons, I belatedly remembered the pie recipes specify *Meyer* lemons which are less sour than regular ones. But eventually I decided to try them in the recipe anyway.

Today I sliced up 3 of the lemons with a mandolin. After stirring in a cup of sugar, I tasted the lemony liquid in the bowl, expecting it to be sour, but it tasted wonderful. So rather than adding another full cup of sugar, I only added half a cup. I stirred up the sugared lemons well and left them in the fridge to sit (to "macerate"). Hopefully on Sunday I'll get around to making a pie from it. (Darn it, I don't have agar nor arrowroot, only cornstarch. Maybe a shopping trip tomorrow.)

Update, 2022/12/10:
Per the website search results of several local food stores, none of them have agar. That probably explains why I'm out of it. The brands I've used in the past were, I believe, these:
Eden Agar Agar Flakes
Telephone brand Agar-Agar Powder - this is from Thailand.

But as agar is both expensive and hard to find, I decided to use tapioca powder instead:
The Tricks to Tapioca, the Other Pie Thickener

I may even still have some tapioca starch, but if not I do have tapioca that I could grind up.

Then again, I'm all dressed and ready to go shopping. So maybe I'll stop by an Asian grocery store after all to see if I can find agar and/or more tapioca starch there.