Processing the lemon harvest

I didn't get around to my tomatoes yesterday, there were too many other things happening. One of them may be of interest to you - I processed four buckets full of lemons. Our lemon tree is a Eureka. It flowers almost all year but we harvest the main crop in late winter. The fruit is a true lemon flavour, not as mild as the Meyer lemon and not as tart as the bush lemon. All the fruit hold a good amount of juice.

The problem with harvesting four buckets of lemons is that some of them will go off before they're used, so I juice all the lemons in one big juicing session and freeze what I don't use straight away.

Being a late Winter harvest, it makes perfect sense to me to make lemon cordial with some of the juice. I love to offer home made drinks to our visitors. Lemon cordial is the quickest and easiest to make and during summer, I always have either home made lemon cordial or ginger beer in the fridge. Most people love being offer an old fashioned drink, icy cold from the fridge with ice cubes clinking.

Just a word on the storage bottles. If you're storing this in the freezer, use plastic bottles as the juice will expand a bit when it freezes. You can use glass bottles for the cordial itself because that is stored in the fridge.

CORDIAL can be made with any fruit juice, including lemon, orange, raspberry, strawberry, pineapple or passionfruit, or anything else that takes your fancy.

Make up a simple sugar syrup - this is generally half water mixed with half sugar. So if you want to make two cups of syrup, you'd mix one cup of water with one cup of sugar. You can make a lighter syrup by adding more water, say one and a half cups of water to one cup of sugar.

Heat the sugar and water on the stove to dissolve the sugar crystals, then cool.

To make the cordial, add equal parts syrup to juice. You do this by half filling a bottle with juice, then topping it up with syrup. That cordial is stored in the fridge.

To make a glass of cordial, pour in about three tablespoons of cordial (test taste, you might need more or less) into a glass and fill it up right to the top with iced water and some ice cubes. A sprig of mint or pineapple sage in the drink is a nice touch.

It took me about half an hour to juice all the lemons. I have a juicing attachment on my food processor so it doesn't take long at all. That half hour of work gave us 12 litres (3½ gallons) of pure lemon juice for the freezer and three bottles of lemon cordial for the fridge.

I took my first glass of new season lemon cordial out to the veranda to relax and enjoy the warm late Winter day. Half an hour of knitting out there and I was ready for the next task.

I hope to take my tomato photos today so I'll write about that in my next post. Thank you for your comments this week. I love seeing all the new names in the comments, but I miss my old readers. Please say hello if you have the time. I know it's pointless commenting all the time, but I'd like to know you're still there. :- )