lemon bounty

we moved at the end of the summer. actually we moved the weekend my mother passed away. we were set to move friday and saturday with our cars for smaller stuff, and the had a moving van rented for sunday. friday night is when we got the call that she might not last the night, then saturday morning is when i booked my flight for that afternoon. andy and our lovely friends moved on sunday while i was up in canada, and it has taken us until ohhhhhhhhhhh about three weeks ago to finally unpack all of our boxes. you can tell which ones we packed ahead of time, which is about 70% of them, as they're clearly labeled and organized, and which boxes were filled with things we didn't get to packing before The Call came. mostly andy did these and they're just shoved full of random crap, thrown in as they came back to our now old house for another pick up with the moving truck.

all this to explain what happened to our lemon tree: it did not survive. we get considerably less sun in the new place, and with all of our stuff going on, we really did neglect her. very sad... we were planning on bringing her to tennessee with us when we move (we're moving in 2010), but her leaves fell off... very very sad.





BUT! our place came with a large lemon tree already and it was ready for harvesting over christmas break. just look at all of our bounty!!! it was enough to make a full batch of lemoncello (pictures to come), and a crapload of lemon juice to freeze in ice cube-sized pieces, which will come in handy not only for my massive amounts of soda water that i go through daily, but also for recipes and general cooking. a great, great help.

have been considering putting the other three dozen or so i have left over to some kind of canning use, but maybe i'll hold on until one of my new cookbooks arrives: Well Preserved.
if they're losing their will to live by the time i get the supplies, then i'll just make more lemon juice to freeze.