When Someone Leaves A Huge Bag Of Key Limes At Your House

I've been puzzled as to what to do with a huge bag of key limes which were left at my house.  Yes, they were left at my house at the same said Malaysian food potluck which made me the proud new owner of 3 bottles of plum wine.  And of course, being the the frugal hater-of-waste I am, I have been trying desperately to use about 15-20 key limes in various ways.  I'm not a fan of key lime pie so that was out of the question.  There are only so many jugs of water I can squeeze lime into.  And so, inspired by food blogs much better than mine, I decided to make Preserved Limes, a cross between preserved Meyer lemons which apparantly was the "in" thing to preserve over winter and the Indian style preserved limes, which generally has lots of crap in it like tumeric. 

Well, I've never been particularly trendy, except for maybe this food blog, which apparantly is the trendy thing to do these days, but that's another rant, discussion, be what it may.  This recipe is ridiculously easy.  I took about 15 key limes and quartered and deseeded them.  I squeezed the juice into a small bowl and then put the limes in a separate bowl.  Then I liberally covered the limes in about 6-8 tsp of fine sea salt, stirred well and mashed them into a quart jar.  Oops, I used too big of a jar and re-mashed them into a pint jar.  I added about 1 tsp sea salt, 1 TBSP mustard seeds (which are toasted in the Indian lime preserve recipes, but are not toasted in traditional pickle recipes, so I stuck with a more traditional approach), and a couple of dried red chili de arbol peppers into the lime juice, swirled around, then poured over the limes.  Since I had an extra lemon that was on its way to lemon heaven, I used the juice of that lemon to top off the jar to make sure all the limes were covered in juice, and then I put another tsp or so of salt on top. 

This is one that will ferment for the first week at room temperature and I will need to turn the jar upside down every other day or so.  It will then go into the refrigerator until the limes are all squishy and soft and can be eaten rind and all, which could be weeks or months.  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with them when they are done, but at least this gives me some time to figure that out.