Rainy Days In A Kitchen

If you’re given lemons make lemonade, that’s what some clever person said.  I’ve got 60 lemons and I’m going to make lemonade and Limoncello and a whole lot more.  With that in mind I reckon it could be another fabulous Friday in my kitchen.

My story today is twofold, one to produce products using lemons, to photograph them and while doing that I notice all my kitchen treasures.  As a mother, housewife and cook my kitchen is the heart of my home and this is where many of my treasures are buried.

A pot plant from a neighbour celebrating the birth of my first grandbaby, it should be blue but this is the closest she could get.  Once it dies I’ll plant the bulb in the garden, where the soil will deliver another flush of blooms when I least expect it, just like our 30 year friendship, once neighbours and now “hartsvriendinne” – a friend of the heart.

While my wrists twist and turn and my bracelets knock, swing and clang I see my son’s carvings on the old yellowwood table, his name and his best friends are indelibly there.  The hardworking lemon squeezer will probably outlive us all.

The little bowl is chipped and cracked but it’s another gift from a friend. One she couldn’t sell in her shop so she gifted me, it’s the perfect size to mix my herbs and salts for the preserved lemons I’m going to make.

Kitty Cluse probably can’t remember selling me the hand painted Turkish  plate with lemons, my favourite colours blue and yellow.

The old black nursery scales have no value anymore, my children are grown-up and who on earth would weigh a child in it anymore,  but it’s perfect for our fruit and vegetables.

My Grandmama’s recipe book, filled with yellowed magazine and newspaper cuttings still has the best lemonade recipe. Today I’ll add Lolli’s Limoncello recipe, who knows my children might come across it one day.

My Mother-in-law's yellow Mother of pearl cups and my Grandmother’s funny Bakelite yellow sugar basin. It certainly has stood the test of time,  will guard the Lemons as they preserve for three months.

Memories are made of this.  Good ones are the only ones we remember.

“It’s always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary…it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.” – Sally Mann

Here is a link to the recipes http://maricha.co.za/blogs/post/lemons-lavender-and-limoncello