When life gives you Lemons make...........

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to spend a few days with a friend at her family's beach house. We had a great time and it was lovely to get away.

I also came back with a bag full of lemons from the lemon tree in the backyard. Nobody had been at the house in a while so the lemon tree was groaning under the weight of all the lemons.

I am lucky enough to have a lemon tree in my backyard but as I have mentioned before I gave the tree a really massive prune when I moved in 2 years ago and it's only just starting to produce fruit. I use lemons quite a bit in my cooking and B loves to just eat them as is! We have been lucky enough to get a lot from friends and I haven't had to buy too many.

So as I had a few extra lemons I decided that today would be a good chance to do something with them. With the help of the CWA I set about making Lemonade Cordial and Lemon Butter. Yum!!

I'm having trouble uploading photos at the moment so I can't show the photo I took of the finished products :-(

I am only new to preserving and making sauces, jams, etc but am really loving it. I'm looking forward to when my lemon tree is producing a lot more and making more of these goodies. You never know - you may get one as a Christmas gift! I'm also planning to give Preserved Lemons a go. If you have a good recipe I would love you to share!

Preserving and Home-made Goodies

As part of my quest to live a simple life I am starting to embrace preserving. There are a number of reasons for this including cost, taste and control of ingredients.

In January we went berry picking with some friends and I turned some of the fruit into jam. Luckily, I have a breadmaker that also can make jam so it was quite an easy process with yummy results. So I ended up with lots of rasberry and blackberry jam.


This weekend I really pushed myself full on into the preserving world. I purchased a box of tomatoes - over 16kgs!! I had already taken a couple of kilos out before taking the photo.

So then began the process of turning them into some useful produce. I have made both pasta sauce and salsa. It has been a bit of an effort, however, I was able to get B to help with some of the washing and chopping of tomatoes and using the mouli food mill. Yesterday I bit off more than I should have by doing 2 batches of 5kg each. Today with only finishing the last 6 kilos was much easier to manage.

Cooking happily away

First lot of pasta sauce all done.

Empty box!!!!!!!

This has been a really enjoyable (and messy) process and I'm now really looking forward to being able to enjoy the fruits of my labour over the next few months. I am actually considering going back next weekend and getting another box which should really set me up for the year.

In the meantime, tomorrow I have to decide what to do with this pumpkin and later in the week the zucchinis that are in the garden!