My baby meyer lemon tree

Is it just me, or are Meyer lemons way easier to get this year than they were last year? I have been buying them 6 at a time, and using them for so many things. I thought I would share a few of them here. I’m also going to give a few tips on having them all year round, so that you never have to be without them. As you can see from the picture above, I have a plan for the future. This little tree is covered in buds right now, so hopefully next year, those will all be lemons!

If you don’t know what a Meyer lemon is, they are a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange. They look like a lemon, but the skin is a little thinner and often a little more orange-colored. They smell like lemon, but sweet. You can use them anywhere you would use a Eureka lemon.

For more information, visit Oysterculture’s citrus entry.

First, the links to things I’ve already made and posted on this blog: blueberry-Meyer lemon scones and lemon-clementine cake. My friend Natasha at 5starfoodie created this great Meyer lemon crepe recipe.

One of my favorite things to do with Meyer lemons is make lemonade. I juice a lemon with the lemon reamer into a tall glass, add 1 tbsp of agave syrup, mix thoroughly, and add sparkling water to the top. It’s pretty good with a little rum, too.

When they start to get a little soft, I hate to waste them. I zest them and store the zest in a glass jar in the freezer. Then I juice them and store the juice in the freezer. If you were really organized, you could even make little ice cubes of lemon juice and then put them in a freezer bag (that’s what my Mom does). Then you have zest and juice all year round. You can make almost any Meyer lemon recipe out there with these two things. I also understand you can freeze the whole lemon, but I’ve never tried it.

Another way to have them around all year round is to make preserved Meyer lemons. There are a lot of recipes for this out there, but I used David Lebovitz’s. He also gives some excellent ideas for how to use them. I like to put a few in my olive jar, to add a little lemon flavor.

The third way to have Meyer lemons all year round is to make candied peel. White on Rice’s blog has an excellent recipe for this, which I made this past weekend. It came out perfect, not at all bitter. I cut it a little finer than they showed on their website, as you’ll see in my picture above.