A Home Made Christmas

Each Wednesday from now until Christmas I will be blogging about a gift idea that can be made at home and I would love it if you would join in each week with your own contribution to "A Home Made Christmas".
I am sure that there are great projects to make, goodies to make, bake and bottle and ideas that you all have to share. I look forward to reading all about the things you make and being inspired by your ideas.


If you are worried about ruining the surprise feel free to post about something you have made in the past, something you saw or something you have received.

When planning home made gifts you need to consider a number of things:
How long the item will take to make? How far ahead do I need to plan?
How long will it keep?  What is the shelf life?
Does it need time to mature like Christmas Cakes/Puddings?
Can I make more than one at a time and give them to a number of people?

This week I want to talk about Pesto and Preserved Lemons.

Both of these can be made at home for a fraction of the cost to buy them and require very few ingredients.

When it comes to pesto all you really need are herbs, garlic, nuts, Parmesan and olive oil.  It is up to you what herbs or nuts you use (my personal favourite is coriander and macadamia) and if you add additional things like chilli.  So if you have an abundance of herbs in your garden pesto could be the ideal gift.

Preserved Lemons are something that you can make well ahead of time.  There are a heap of recipes on the net that use different spices along side their lemons but for a good basic recipe similar to the one I have used try this one.  The only thing I do differently is that I cut my lemons into quarters so I can use smaller jars and still cram lots in.  If you still lots of lemons you could make a few jars now and they would be ready to go at Christmas.

What are you making this Christmas? I am looking forward to seeing your ideas so please link up below and leave a brief comment as well.