Life hands out lemons....

...and I make lemonade! Quite literally. Half of every home has a lemon tree and everyone's lemon tree is groaning under the weight of rapidly ripening fruit. What to do with all this stuff????? Think of your average garden zucchini. You can't help but get excited when the first few are ready to be picked. Then you get rather blase' about zucchini for supper again. Make zucchini bread, foist them off on friends and neighbors. Finally, panic sets in as the squash-on-steroids vegetable overtakes the backyard. You take boxes of the stuff to soup kitchens (and run fast before they refuse yet another donation of the green monsters), leave a few in the church vestibule and in a crate on the berm with a sign that screams, FREE!

Well, that is the point where our neighbors are now. I picked up a bag of them from the bench outside church this morning. I've picked up bags hanging from fence posts and entrances to CWA meetings. My sister-in-law has them ready for when our paths might even remotely cross. Further down our street, one homeowner got fed up, cut down the entire tree and dragged it to the curb--with tons of ripe lemons still on the branches. I was far from the only vulture at that carcass scavenging what I could carry.

So what do I do with them all? I told you. I make lemonade. Actually, I juice them and freeze one-cup blocks for use when summer arrives. I aim to have half the freezer full of lemon blocks before its all over. Kevin doesn't really need all that meat in there (I much prefer eggs for protein anyway) and he can always find it on sale year round. But I have only now to seize this opportunity to build my defenses against the longest, hottest summers I hope I'll ever have to endure. A one-cup block makes only one quart (liter) of lemonade. That's about two days, if we're lucky. And summer seems to last about 270 days. Do the math. Hmmmm. Maybe half a freezer just isn't enough.....