If you don't like lemonade

The saying goes "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade."  But there are many other interesting and useful things you can do with lemons.  First, of course, you can use them in hummus.  But you already knew that.

There are many other culinary uses of lemons, and I hope Caroline will add to this list.  My favorite of all, after hummus of course, is anything that requires lemon ZEST.  I love that word.  I don't particularly enjoy zesting a lemon, but the very word sounds like it should be fun.  I sort of imagine Julia Child laughing with glee to describe the word ZEST.  I know it's also the name of an old brand of soap (is it still around?  I just use Ivory Soap.  But I recently visited a friend in Chicago who had a bar of soap she got on her trip to Greece that was made with olive oil.  Great stuff.)  Well, if you get a lemon and don't want to make lemonade or hummus, you can zest it or just look at the lemon and think of the word and laugh out loud.

Next there are the desserts:  lemon meringue pie, lemon cake, and so on.

If turning a lemon into food isn't your thing, you can use lemons as a cleaning product.  If any of you have been to my house, you know I am no expert on cleaning, so you will have to take the world wide web's word for that.  Laundry, too:  you can supposedly get underarm stains out of clothes using lemon juice and water.  But since none of my Gentle Readers have that problem...

Last, but not least, in an emergency, or just for fun, you can make electricity with a lemon.  Place a strip of copper and a strip of zinc in the lemon.  Attach wires to the strips, and then to a light bulb.  Voila!  (Does this sound a little like the battery cooking episode?) 

Do all these uses of lemons make you want to participate in hemifrontalcranialkinetics?  (Yes, I made up that word.  Aren't I clever?)