Who Knew You Can Do? Lemons!

It's January in Arizona - citrus time!  I have this great lemon tree that produces far more lemons than I can use, so I've been working on maximizing my use of the lemons for the past couple of years. After all, you can only make so much lemonade regardless of how many lemons life gives you!  Even if you don't have a lemon tree, this is a good time to find inexpensive citrus at the grocery store. 

I'm going to try/demonstrate a few of these (some of these are obvious) and maybe a few new ones, so keep an eye out this week.  Here is my short list of things to do with lemons:

1.  Freeze them.  You can freeze whole or in slices or just the juice.  The only caveat is that they will be mushy when you thaw them, but the juice is just fine.

2.  Clean wood cutting boards - Use a half of a lemon as a scrub, rubbing the lemon juice on the cutting board along with some kosher or sea salt.  Cleans, kills bacteria and smells great.

3.  Clean your microwave - Cut up, put in a microwave safe dish (I use Pyrex) with water and heat in the microwave for 5 minutes.  The mess in your microwave with just wipe right off!

4.  Freshen your garbage disposal - Cut up lemons into bite size hunks (including rind) and throw in the garbage disposal. It will deodorize and smell great.  If you need to clean it a little more, include some baking soda, squeeze out the juice and let it sit in the disposal for a couple of minutes before you turn it on.

5.  Air freshener in the kitchen - Throw a few cut up lemons in a pot of boiling water with cinnamon and whole cloves and then let it simmer - smells great!

6.  Make a facial scrub - This one I am anxious to try, but while you're waiting for my blog post, here is a recipe from Hot Beauty Health.

9.  Make Limoncello - I'm intimidated by this one, so you might not see a blog post on this for about a month or so.  In the meantime, here is a quick recipe from Food Network

10.  Lemon Squares/Bars - Here is my favorite recipe so far.

Finally, I didn't leave room in my top 10 for lemonade, but I'll make sure to include my favorite recipe in another post.  Obviously, there are so many ways to use lemon in cooking so I didn't include any recipes, but remember - those frozen lemons can help you with those recipes all through the year.

cindy