I’ve intended to photograph and write about food for the entirety of July thus far and have either been too tired, too busy, too tired from being busy, or not blessed with photography daylight to achieve anything (other than being incredibly grumpy about my lack of blogging). After lugging a spirit-liftingly full bag of lemons back to town with me following my last visit home, it occurred to me that a jaunty interstitial in the form of a round-up of lemon recipes could temporarily countermand this issue. Naturally, it immediately created a new burden of chaotic formatting and link-hunting; after all that I’m not sure if the lemon recipes I’ve gathered are that useful, but they are at least mildly out of the ordinary to anyone expecting a lemon meringue pie here.

And after all, what is more bioluminescently cheering than the scent of a freshly cloven lemon? Here’s some of the ways I’ve described its flavour over the years:

• “Gloriously punchy”
• “Causes near-instant euphoria”
• “Sunshine-scented”
• “Cleanly optimistic”
• “Vigorously uplifting”
• “That lilting descant”

Some might say I’m projecting too much onto this unpretentious fruit. To that I say, first of all there are so few avenues of harmless rapture in this life, second of all, slice open a lemon and inhale it. You see? I’m responding accurately, as I always do. But enough acidic asides, let’s get acidic upfront and dive into this collection of recipes.

Two recipes for the most lemons of all

Four lemon pastas, somehow all unique and necessary

Four surprisingly lemony vegetable dishes

One vegan lemon cake, two ways

Two citrussy recipes for easily swapping in lemon

Of course, now that I’ve committed to this I have been flooded with lemon recipe ideas, but I will keep updating this with any imminent lemon recipes for your ongoing citrus-scented edification.

music lately

Big Time Sensuality by Björk. Few songs so purely evoke lemon than this! “Something big is coming and we’re both included” is exactly how it feels to heartily inhale a lemon’s giddily promising scent. 

Give Me the Cure by Fugazi, which performs their deft trick of entirely discombobulating you, genre-wise, while being so straightforwardly catchy that it’s also quite disarming.   

Be My Angel by Mazzy Star; this band is rather like the Jesus and Mary Chain, if they want to create lots of songs that sound kinda similar then good for them! What else could you possibly ask them to do? Why would I clamour for such an uncouth pursuit as variety when I could instead happily absorb their consistent perfection? Also the more you listen to this the less it sounds like anything else on earth!  

Burning Down the House, as covered by Paramore, now look — I’ve only been an intermittent enjoyer of Paramore, in that I haven’t overly sought them out but have always enjoyed that which has come my way, but — the dazzling vocal elasticity? The gutteral howl? The captivating stage presence? I feel I need to do my due diligence here. 

PS: As I’ve said previously, ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal is important to me. Their team, through perishingly difficult circumstances, are on the ground trying to help. It’s been a while since their last update at the end of May but if you’re looking for relief effort to support, I suggest them as a starting point.