How to Master Your Kitchen

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you might know of my infatuation with lemons. I love lemon products and whether the recipe calls for lemon zest or juice, it doesn't matter. In fact, I have a jar of lemon curd in my refrigerator that calls for both lemon zest and lemon juice and I just straight up eat the lemon curd out of the jar with a spoon. Call me gross if you want. 

I want to encourage you to use freshly squeezed lemon juice anytime a recipe calls for lemon juice. Why? Because freshly squeezed is the best, it has more flavor than the bottled variety, you know there aren't any preservatives in freshly squeezed and don't even try and give me the excuse bottled lemon juice is easier.

You can't give me that excuse especially if you have a juicer. There are a ton of different types of juicers out there and no I'm not necessarily talking the heavy duty juicers to make a green monster. There are citrus specific juicers. Here are a few examples.

These juicers can range from $10 like the wooden one, which is what I have to the $200 Breville juicer.  Whether you go low or high end, the result is still the same, freshly squeeze juice. The only different is having to deal with the seeds and pulp with the wooden juicer but if you don't have $200 to blow then a strainer will help with that. 

All you do is slice the lemon, orange, lime in half at the equator mark, then use whatever juicer you have to extract the juice. Trust me, your recipes will taste a lot more fresh and vibrant with freshly squeezed juice than that you have no idea how long it has been sitting on the store shelf bottle of juice.
If you want recipes that I have blogged about that use lemon juice, here is a great recipe for lemon bars,  a lemon blueberry cake, lemon raspberry bars, lemon blackberry cupcakes, pink lemonade bars. I promise at one point I will put some up savory recipes using lemon juice.
Until then, juice away my friends, juice away!