A friend of mine posted an old saying this week in discovering a lemon tree on her new farm - 'when life gives you lemons......make lemonade!' And she sure did make some yummy things....
We visited my sister on her new 'farm' yesterday and with this quote in mind, we plucked her tree free of sunshiney goodness! And similarly tackled the mandarin tree with lots of little helpers!...
There is rewarding work in planting + harvesting your own produce and great wonder and enjoyment to be had by all the family...sticks gathered became firewood or sculpture, rocks for fairy houses, paperbark to draw on, hard unripe fruit became balls tossed around, fruit peel can be boiled for experiments in natural dying...and the list of creativity goes on and on, most of these discussed or undertaken in our wanderings yesterday!
WE were most excited about all the lemony, yummy goodness we could make from the harvest and after peeling what seemed like a truck-load of lemons...we made our first BIG mistake...instead of manually, and painstakingly juicing the lemons like most people, we decided there would be more goodness in whizzing the whole peeled lemons in the vitamix!
Three jugloads of pulpy goodness later and after adding sugar to our first batch of lemonade, we taste-tested to a sad end - the plith just under the friut's skin had given the mixture an unbearable bitter aftertaste!! We had reduced the tree's whole harvest to this pulpy disaster!!
When we recovered from the sadness of this reality, we were left with a small tin pail of lemons which we humbly juiced in the traditional manner!
Wearily, we began the much-anticipated lemon cake. Our lemon-disaster went from bad to worse when my sister savaged her hand in the mixmaster! The ambulance was called and damage patched up in hospital - a dramatic way of getting out of dealing with the lemon-affair!!
I even more humbly and wearily, but determined not to let the day's events have a 'bitter' end, made a syrupy lemon cake and stored the lemon-pulp-concoction to be used in 'organic cleaning products.'
So when 'life gives you lemons' on my sister's farm...you end up in hospital!!...but on her celebrated return, a yummy lemon cake saves the day!!
