When Life (or the Food Co-op) Gives You Lemons...

I got 10 lemons from the food co-op and my mom was about to toss her five out so I grabbed them. My children love lemonade so I made lemonade. I've only made it from concentrate before so I was happy to try it fresh.

I cut the lemons in half.

I have an automatic juicer but I lent it to my sister when she had a million and a half apples to deal with so I had to borrow my mom's not so automatic juicer. In the end, because I only had 15 lemons, it was probably just as fast to do it this way because I didn't have to peel them all. I first squeezed as much juice as I could out of a half over the top of the juicer to collect any seeds that may have fallen out and then I stuck it on the juicer and pushed while twisting it back and forth.

While I was doing this, I was thinking of an episode of Caillou where he makes juice with his grandma. I think they had a grapefruit and a lemon they were going to use. What kid wants to drink grapefruit and lemon juice?! Good thing Caillou decided he wanted orange in it too. Really, I was thinking that I wished I had paid more attention to the show so I would know the proper way to use the juicer. It worked out okay though because as I was thinking those deep thought about a children's educational cartoon these

turned into these


There were a few times when the juicer started looking like this:

so I emptied it out in my compost bucket.

Next I disolved sugar in some boiling water (1:1)


to create a syrup. This was supposed to make it so the sugar didn't drop to the bottom. It worked much better than just adding straight sugar.

I then added the same amount of lemon juice to the syrup (1 part sugar, 1 part water, 1 part lemon juice) I also tried a bit of the straight lemon juice to see if I could taste a difference between fresh and concentrate. :{ I couldn't. It was to sour to taste anything. I won't do that again.

After mixing that, I added four more parts water.

It almost felt like summer again.

I composted the pulp, seeds and peels but I got to thinking that I could probably have actually used them too. I could have used the zest - although that is a lot of zest and I don't know how to preserve it - or I could have boiled the peels with some spices to scent and humidify the air. Do you have any other ideas of ways I could have used them?