Our Favorite Easy Recipes to Savor the Last of Citrus Season

Follow food editors Ellen and Maya as they share what they’re eating, drinking, and cooking each week. Subscribe to The Sunset Pantry newsletter.

Annabelle Breakey

The Perfectly Moist, Dense Cake

Citrus season is truly one of the best things about living in the West. In my Oakland neighborhood, lemon trees are heavy with aromatic fruit that’s ripe for the picking. Neighbors are so overloaded that they generously set out buckets of perfect Meyer lemons, satsumas, and tangerines on the corner in hopes that someone has time to make a marmalade of their own. But beyond making gorgeous citrus salads, or just plain peeling and eating them, what’s a citrus fan to do with a glut of juicy fruit? Get out the bundt pan, friends, it’s time to make one of Sunset’s most beloved recipes: Whole Orange Cake. As the name implies, whole oranges go into this cake, using peel, pith, pulp, and juice to create a deeply flavorful and moist crumb that evokes marmalade, but in cake form. Our friends at Food52 agree—they named it one of their Genius Recipes. Make it, and find out why.

—Ellen Fort, food editor

Maya’s Corner

Ngoc Minh Ngo

A Bright, Chunky Meyer Lemon Salsa Verde for Eggs, Roast Chicken, and Just About Anything

This Meyer Lemon Salsa Verde is truly a do-it-all sauce. If you want to make the most of citrus season while it’s still here, you do that by spooning this bright, chunky sauce onto almost every plate of food you consume. Make a batch every Sunday for the week ahead—I’m not going to stop you. This salsa verde recipe, packed with Meyer lemon, lightly pickled shallots, Champagne vinegar, parsley, capers, and olive oil, comes from San Francisco’s Foreign Cinema (an SF diner rite of passage in the Mission district), which serves this saucy citrusy addition with scrambled eggs and a shower of Parmigiano-Reggiano. At home, use a fresh batch on a fried egg breakfast of some sort, and next-day leftovers on grilled baguette, roast chicken, little gem salad, grilled salmon, or anything, really. There are no wrong choices.

—Maya Wong, assistant food editor

Thomas J. Story

More to read this week:

• Make the most of citrus season with these 42 recipes, from Chicken with Preserved Meyer Lemon and Olives to Citrus Salad with Spiced Vanilla Syrup.
• Our 15 favorite Meyer lemon recipes ever. You’re welcome.
• We updated a classic Sunset recipe from 1986 into a 2020 version you would actually eat today: meet the Avocado Fan Salad with Oranges and Pistachios.
• Former Top Chef contestant and Bay Area local Tanya Holland is opening a California soul food restaurant at the Oakland Museum. Here’s what we know so far.
• We can all agree that February flew by, right? Here are the recipes we’ve been cooking this month, from immune system-boosting foods to post-Valentine meals.

Looking for more inspiration? Head over to Sunset Recipes for our winter cooking highlights.