What to Do With Lemons

 

We have a lemon tree that produces an abundance of lemons every year.  That would be great except we don’t care for lemons (or homemade lemonade) and even if we did, who can eat bags and bags of them?  I hate to waste them so I’m constantly trying to figure out what to do with them.  I normally give away as many as I can, juice some of them and freeze the juice in ice cube trays to have for baking or lemon water.  After that, I’m lost and my compost heap is well fed.

My sister-in-law gave me two great ideas!  One was cookies – while I’m not a fan of lemon flavor, the rest of my family loves it.  SIL found a cookie recipe and made them for us.  They were actually pretty good….so I made a batch and they came out just as good!  There are actually a bunch of recipes on her site that use lemons…I may have to try some of them out too.

She also found a recipe for dishwasher soap.  I’ve made homemade laundry soap and use it from time to time (I’ve been finding great deals on my favorite brands at CVS so I haven’t made laundry soap in ages!).  I made dishwasher soap once and it was a flop!  It hardened and was a pain to measure out.  This time, I only made a single batch and I followed the directions carefully.  I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now and it works just as good as the name brand I normally buy. Plus it’s a whole lot cheaper!  I didn’t have to buy anything (I had the coarse salt leftover from last time and the other stuff I had on hand).  I will say that I did NOT strain my mixture.  I don’t have a strainer, so I just blended it really, really well!

I’ve been juicing lemons and freezing them in egg trays (I think my ice cube trays met with an unfortunate end), I’m going to chop up some lemons for future batches of dish soap, and I’m freezing some lemon peel for the cookies.  I still need more ideas (seriously, we had at least 5 shopping bags full!), but I’m not putting as many lemons in my compost heap this year!

Do you like lemons?  Any great ideas for what to do with an over abundance of them?  I really do hate feeding them to my compost.