I’ve been wanting to try new things in my cooking and since lemons are tasty and good for you, hey, why not!  Walmart had bags of lemons on sale for $2.10 so I bought one. Last time I bought a bag of lemons we made lemonade, this time, its about cooking.

In case you’re new to the word “zest” I’ll let you know it is the peeling of the lemon I am referring to. Same would be true with making “orange zest”.  And no, I don’t know where the word “zest” comes from, so don’t ask me 🙂 .

• Rinse your lemons, of course, and then grab your handy zesting tool if you have one.  Because I use to sell Pampered Chef, I do. Now zest away!  You can see the scoring marks on the lemons in the picture.

• I put the zest into an ice cube tray, fill with water and freeze.

• Now pop out your zesty ice cubes and put them into a freezer bag.

Its that easy. Usually I bag anything like this and stick in the freezer but I saw this wonderful idea of  filling an ice cube tray in a magazine article and decided to try it.  You can also freeze fresh herbs this way too.

Now you may be thinking, what next? Well, I’ll tell you.

• Now that you have them in cubes you can pull out as much as you want and just drop one or two into your soups or whatever you are cooking that needs that wonderful lemon flavor.

• I was thinking that might be good in homemade lemonade too, but I don’t know if I’d like to have the zest floating in my drink. What do you think?

• Lemons smell good so you could put them in a pan to simmer along with some cinnamon sticks, homemade potpourri of sorts. You could also just simmer the lemon peels vs. the zest.

•  I searched for some recipes to use lemon zest in and found some that look interesting enough to consider at this link .

Do you have a favorite recipe that uses lemon zest to share with me? Leave me a comment!

 *Sharing at Crystal & Comp.