When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and lemon juice, and lemon curd and.....

I bought my daughter a Meyer lemon tree a few years ago and planted it in the front yard.  Last year was the first year we got a few lemons, but they didn't last long.  This year it has been loaded, and from friends and other locals it sounds like that is pretty common this year.

This was the remaining 30+ lemons after we had already juiced at least ten.

My kids and I went out to pick the lemons today and we must have gotten over 40 off a 7 foot tall tree (I forgot to count until we already started juicing, so this is an estimation).  We made a big pitcher of lemonade and froze two ice cube trays of juice for future use.

Then I started looking for recipes to use.  I found a pretty simple one for a lemon curd and had the other ingredients on hand (eggs from my backyard chickens, sugar, and some butter).  It took two lemons to get the rind and juice needed and took about ten minutes to cook.

Lemon curd in a Pyrex fridgie

I found these recipes that we might try this week.  

Pork Meatballs with Lemon and Thyme

Lemon Braised Chicken and Beans with Mint Pesto

I am sure we will share with coworkers and neighbors as well.

Dinner from the Backyard

This summer I have been lazy about gardening (again) but had a large squash vine volunteer plant growing in my garden area.  I figured out it was a Seminole pumpkin (I have grown them in the past, it must have come from the compost).  I grabbed a couple of ripe pumpkins off of it a few weeks ago and there are more growing. 

Today I was thinking about the pumpkin and how I was going to cook it and I started thinking about stuffed acorn squash.  I have some chanterelles that grow in my backyard (as well as the neighborhood green spaces) so I checked the area to see if any were growing with all our recent rain.  Sure enough, there they were. 

It ended up being easier to cook each separately.  I make a creamy sauce out of the chanterelles (with onion) and put it over orzo pasta.  I cooked the squash separately in the microwave with a little butter.  We mixed the two together and it was pretty good.  I would like to come up with a stuffed Seminole pumpkin recipe for smaller pumpkins in the future.

Figs!

Several years ago we got an Alma fig from Just Fruits and Exotics.  I chose it because the fruits are a greenish color (with light purple tint) when ripe, fooling the birds into thinking they are unripe.  Since I am not very good at protecting my garden, I thought it was a good choice for us.  They started producing fruit a couple of years ago, and this year was looking to be a good crop.  I had been checking the fruits daily and the ones I was looking at were unripe.  Until today, all of a sudden I noticed several ripe figs, some were even starting to leak fluid, ready to burst at the seams.

My Alma Figs

I found this recipe for Roasted Figs with Honey and Rosemary.  I was in luck, we had recently extracted honey from our bees and my rosemary plant could use a nice trim.  You could probably be really local and use a cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy or another local cheese producer but all I had on hand was a feta and some whole wheat ritz crackers.  It still tasted delicious.