Citrusy Goodness

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

Lemons get a bad rap, quite unfairly, I think.  Yeah - they are pretty sour.  But they're also really freaking awesome.

Lemon cookies on a Sunday morning - doesn't get much better.

First - the culinary.  Lemons, when used correctly, are AMAZING.  The easy one is, of course, lemonade, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are countless staple lemon desserts (bars, pies, cakes).  Candied lemon peels.  Limoncello.  Sorbets.  It's also a common short-term food preservative, thanks to its low pH.

Then we get into all that random DIY stuff that's so popular these days.  Lemon juice is quite an excellent cleaning agent.  Lemon peel oil is of similar use, more so for cleaning and polishing wood.  And, again, because of its low pH, lemon juice is a particularly painful effective natural antibiotic.

And that's just all the stuff you'll find on Wikipedia.  That doesn't even include the plethora of handyman pins that you'll probably find on Pinterest.  I'm willing to bet someone has a lemon-based volcano.

Actually - that's the first pin that pops up when you search for "lemon volcano."  That's even better than what I was expecting.

My point is - making something good out of lemons isn't that hard.  If someone were to randomly give you lemons, you should probably say, "Hey!  Thanks for the lemons!"  It's actually pretty good of them, y'know.

If you want a really good idiom about making the best of a bad situation, it should be more like, "When life gives you moldy cheese, make penicillin."

...Uh.  It's a work in progress.  But you know what I mean.

Do yourself a favor, and get some lemon love.

Until the next.

P.S. - for those who would like the recipe I used for the cookies pictured above, here.  Warning:  they are frackin' delicious.