Adventures With Lemons

The area where we live had truly beautiful weather this weekend; temperatures were in the 60s and 70s. I was outside doing some weeding Saturday afternoon when a neighbor's little girl passed by with a paper bag in her arms. "Want some lemons?" she asked. I looked up at her and replied that sure, I'd take a couple. "Okay," she said cheerfully, continuing down the street. "I'll be right back with your lemons!"

I went back to my weeding. There had been some rain earlier in the week, and the warmth and the wet had brought up a whole new crop of oxalis, a plant that looks kind of like clover. It's a weed that's astonishingly good at spreading itself: it can grow new plants from bits of root left in the soil, it can have sex like other flowering plants, and it can reproduce asexually by means of little bulb-like appendages it grows on its roots. It's horribly pernicious stuff. Anyway,I dug and pulled a few minutes more before the little girl came skipping back, again with a paper bag in her arms. "Here's your lemons," she panted as she handed me the bag. "We're pruning our tree, and we've got this huge bag of lemons that we don't know what to do with!"

I thanked her as I received the bag. From its heft (and from the girl's comments), it clearly contained significantly more than the 'couple' that I'd said I'd take. I looked in, and sure enough there were around a dozen of the things. I stepped inside and told the huz that we needed to do something with lemons for dinner that night.

Interestingly, the lemons that we had been given were not the standard bright yellow fruits that are commonly seen in your local grocery. These fruits were lemon-shaped and smelled lemony, but their skins were quite distinctly orange. These were Meyer lemons, a cross between a true lemon and (probably) a mandarin or sweet orange (Wikipedia). The fruit is hard to find in groceries even out here, but plenty of folks have Meyer lemon trees in their yards as our neighbors do. As one might guess, Meyer lemons are sweeter and have a fruitier flavor than their true lemon cousins, but they can be used in essentially the same fashion in cooking.

( It was time to hunt for recipes. )