When Life Gives You Lemons

My birthday falls in a few days and because it is squeezed close to the holidays, I am not expecting much. I do not care and that is not a lie. As a child, my birthday was important (to me), but because it was squeezed into a year of four other siblings birthdays and always close to Christmas, I only had two real birthday parties in my youth. The rest were family and cake. I felt cheated then but realize it was all unimportant now.  I neither look forward to or dread birthdays.  They are days on the calendar and numbers on my years.  There are far more important days in any life.

Having written all of that I decided to make some cookies.  Well, I decided to do a bunch of stuff.  As my readers may know, I have a Meyer lemon tree.  It is a sad little tree, much like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, but prior to the photo taken below it had 30 lemons ripening on its scraggly boughs.

I cannot use more than two dozen lemons at one time, so I picked half.

They smell marvelous and are super full of juice.

As I slice them I cannot but marvel at the seeds inside with all their potential to become new young lemon trees, but I have to control myself as I have no room or time in my life for growing more lemon trees.

I have tools for zesting the rind and tools for squeezing the juice.

The juice goes into ice cube trays and after becoming frozen goes into freezer bags for use in the months to come.  The zest gets frozen as well for seafood dinners and soups.  Other lemons are cut in half and frozen for future flavoring.  Then I get a brilliant idea from the Cooks Illustrated cookbook to make some lemon zest cookies.  I do not like this cookbook very much as it keeps giving me recipes that are photographed beautifully but rarely work---at least for me.  But, who does not like cookies?  The fresh zest gets mixed with the sugar and creamed with 2 sticks of butter and the juice gets added to the batter.  Hubby says it smells so good as he watches his football game.

And this is the result of all my labor!  I turned down the heat for the second batch and let them cool a little longer before removing them and this is still what I got!  They are so messy (but quite edible) you have to eat them over the sink!

Alas, when life gives you lemons you can sweep the crumbs off the plate and counter and add to a sealed container for topping on ice cream.