11 Things You Can Do with Lemons
If you find yourself with an abundance of lemons and don’t need garnishes for a round of iced teas, try some of these lemon tricks instead.
Eliminate Food Stains
Do you have plastic storage containers stained by food such as tomato sauce? Rub lemon juice over the stains and leave them to dry out in the sun.
Make Sour Cream and Buttermilk
Out of sour cream? You need a cup of heavy cream, a 1/4 cup of milk, and two teaspoons of lemon juice. Need some buttermilk? You just need one tablespoon of lemon juice per cup of milk.
Prevent Guacamole Browning
Squeeze a little lemon over your guac before covering it with plastic wrap. It’ll stay a nice emerald green for a day or so longer. Assuming you wait that long to eat guac.
Clean Toilets
Let half a cup of lemon juice sit in the toilet bowl for half an hour before scrubbing and it’ll get cleaner, faster. (It won’t, however, stay smelling lemony fresh.)
Brighten Aluminum
Spruce up your aluminum cookware by rubbing it with lemon juice and then buffing to a shine. Be sure to rinse off the lemon juice afterwards.
Wash Hardwood Floors
You shouldn’t soak hardwood floors, so clean them by adding a cup of lemon juice to your water bucket. Make sure you wring your mop out a lot before mopping. The lemon juice will help clean and disinfect.
Dry the Peel
Don’t want to keep lemons around to zest for recipes, presumably because you keep using it to clean things? Dry a bunch of it. Dried lemon zest keeps longer than fresh lemon peel.
Make Stuff Smell Better
Rub a slice of lemon on a cutting board to remove odours of garlic and onion. Squeeze lemon juice onto some cotton balls and place in the fridge for a lemony fresh scent. Drop some lemon peels down the garbage disposal to remove sink stench.
We swear this is true: one of Grandma’s friends brings Ziploc bags with her in her purse so she can collect everyone’s lemon wedges after lunch. The wedges go down her garbage disposal. Now that’s commitment to a nice smelling garbage disposal.
Make Your Whole House Smell Better
Not content with making garbage disposals smell nice? Try making a simmering potpourri and improving the odour of your whole house. Basically, a simmering potpourri is just lemons and other nice-smelling stuff in an uncovered slow cooker. We’re told it’ll clear the scent of teenagers and body spray right out of your living room.
Preserve Them
Preserved lemons have the lemon flavour without a lot of the sourness. They’re great with white fish, chicken, light salads, quinoa, and Middle Eastern food. So preserve a few lemons.
Make Lemonade
With all due respect to Calvin, we never huck lemons back when life throws them our way. We’re happy to make lemonade.