Day 334 - Making Lemonade

lemon tree in our backyard

Alex wanted one of two types of trees in the yard of whatever new home we chose when we moved to California, either palm trees or citrus trees. Our new home blessed him with two small lemon trees. The fact that they are small is truly a blessing since we can reach the fruit wherever it grows. There are plenty of citrus trees near ours that tower over the houses that share the lots for us to see what life might be like if our trees were larger, both in terms of the logistics of picking the fruit and the quantities produced, particularly at this time of year.

We didn't know what we had last year at this time because the poor trees hadn't been watered for months before we moved in. We managed to get a few pieces from them last winter, enough to give Alex a thrill when he squeezed the juice from a lemon from his tree into his gin and tonic for the first time. We harvested all the fruit when we started seeing blossoms appearing. Can I even use that term if the quantity fit into one bucket?

Years ago in Berkeley, one of the houses I lived in had a large lemon tree in the back yard. I recall that tree having blossoms, immature fruit, and mature fruit all at the same time, so I looked forward to seeing fresh lemons in a few months. But the variety of trees here must be different. The fruit of everyone's citrus trees mature at the same time, at this time. There is so much plenty. No one seems to need any so giving them away isn't much of an option. 

It is a twist on the saying "When life deals you lemons, make lemonade." Just how much lemonade can one person be expected to make? 

Every day I pick a dozen or so lemons. And at least once a week I use my new juicer to extract juice, cups and cups of juice. I pour the juice into ice cube trays and freeze it, emptying the frozen lemon juice cubes into Ziplock bags so I can make more cubes. There are so many I had to start putting the bags into the spare freezer in the garage.

One of the trees is nearly bare of fruit, the smaller of the two. But I keep spying more fruit hiding in the larger tree. I have printed out dozens of recipes calling for lemon juice so I will have some purpose for all that juice later. In the meantime, I have been taking the traditional route - making lemonade.

by  Daniel Y. Go 

Back in Berkeley, I also made lemonade from the fruits of the tree in the back yard. Strangely enough, that lemonade didn't taste like any I had ever had before or since. Instead of a uniform slightly sweet but slightly sour taste, that batch of lemonade brought two waves of flavor, one very sweet, followed by one very sour. When I found a recipe online, it looked a lot like I remembered the earlier recipe, so I wondered if I would experience that same pair of flavors, one after another. But like everything else in Berkeley, those lemons must have been very different for the lemonade from the lemons from the trees in our backyard tastes wonderful, just a bit sweet and just a bit sour with flavors uniformly delivered with each swallow. I have been happily grabbing a glass of lemonade several times a day, feeling good about using the lemons and getting more fluids with each glass.

But then yesterday I had my session with a nurse on nutrition and diabetes. My fasting blood sugar levels from two tests in a row were just over the line (137 and 132) and my Hemoglobin A1c was just under the diabetes diagnosis point (6.2), putting me in the category of pre-diabetic. That makes paying attention to the nurse's instructions on both diet and exercise all that much more important. She advised that losing just 5-7% of my current weight could bring all those test results back down under the diabetic diagnosis point, but that won't happen without paying attention to what I eat, not just how much I eat, as well as getting regular exercise.

The first question she asked was whether I drank fruit juice. I thought the question was a sign that drinking fruit juice was good. When I replied that I have started drinking a lot more juice now that I have a juicer, she smiled and said I should stop right now. Instead of drinking juice, I should eat the fruit. But lemons, she said, aren't even fruit when it comes to nutrition. In her opinion, lemonade is nothing more than flavored sugar water. And that is not on the approved diet.

Now what? I guess my first resolution for 2014 is to find another positive, optimistic purpose for all those lemons since making lemonade is off the table. Here are a few I thought of today.

• I can put slices of lemon in my water. Or even drops of juice in the water to give it some zing. But that won't make a dent in the supply.
• I can put lemons down the disposal to freshen up the sink. But that seems wasteful.
• I can try drying the lemons to put into potpourri.

Any other ideas?

Happy New Year.