When life hands you too many lemons...

I have lemons coming out of my ears. This happens about this time every year. I can't bake fast enough to use them all, my friends only want so many, and it's against Mother Nature to just throw them away.


So, one way I have found to get more use out of them is to juice them and freeze the juice. I pour the squeezed juice to ice cube trays and freeze it. The next day I pop the frozen lemon cubes out of the trays and put them in a Ziploc freezer bag for easier storage and to prevent them from picking up freezer odors and frost. Now I have easy access to pre-measured cubes of semi-fresh-squeezed lemon juice to use throughout the year.

If I want to add more lemony flavor, I sometimes will grate some lemon zest in the lemon juice before freezing it. Each frozen lemon cube is equal to about two tablespoons. Don't forget to put a date on the freezer bag so you know how old the juice is.


While I'm on the lemon kick, let me tell you about my all-time favorite kitchen gadget. It's called a citrus trumpet. All you do is screw the trumpet into the end of a lemon or lime and squeeze out the juice. You can store the trumpet while still attached to the lemon in the refrigerator for a few days if you don't use all the juice.

Another nifty little kitchen gadget is the citrus juicer shown below. This is the tool to use if you aren't juicing enough lemons to get out the electric juicer, but too many lemons for the citrus trumpet. It's designed to prevent the seeds from being expressed with the juice.



Now, what can you do with all of the juiced lemon peels? Throw several of them in the garbage disposal and turn it on. This not only cleans the disposal, it fills the kitchen with the fragrance of lemony goodness.