Cooking Baking Eating

I love to cook with citrus. Lemons and limes tend to make it into at least half of my dishes, more with lemon than lime but that could change.

So what do you do when you get a hankering for something with a hint of lemon? I mean really, I do love having lemons sitting out on the counter. But they will rot if you don’t get to all the cooking that you really want to during the week and they can end up getting thrown away.

So what does one do when faced with a large bag of lemons (or limes in this case) but want to make sure that using them will be easy in the future as well as getting your money’s worth in the long run?

By killing them of course.

Delicious death!

I use a hand held juicer or a fork and I juice all my citrus, collecting all of the juice and some of the pulp but being careful of seeds. With lemons I will generally zest them before juicing, you CAN freeze it and it will keep, but with limes I haven’t quite found a reason yet to keep the zest, mostly just using the juice.

There weren’t any seeds in this batch of limes, so with the pulp I got around 2.5 cups of juice, which is quite a lot for the little limes. But really, what do you do with all that juice now that you have it ready?

Freeze of course. I then take my handy dandy ice cube trays and freeze them.

Each of my little cubes has a little more than a tablespoon of juice. Its really perfect to have in the freezer, stored in a labeled bag, since I can just grab a cube at a time and throw it in the pot with whatever I’m cooking.

Or sometimes I get REALLY creative, and take out the dehydrator…

I have quite a bag of these now, but I’m not quite sure my idea for them will pan out. They might just end up being tied into a windchime/dangly-thing. They smell wonderful too!