Fresh Home-grown Citrus Juice All Year?

We all love mixing flavors in our cooking, enhancing some dishes with mysterious and delicate-tasting herbs and extracts. One flavor that never goes out of style is to mix fresh-from-the-garden (your garden or your neighbor's, or your produce market's) citrus juice to chicken, roasts and other preparations such as alcohol or non-alcohol drinks.

If you live in warmer climes, like California, for instance, there's going to be a time when your garden's citrus tree(s), or your kind friend's or neighbor's one, will start bending down from the sheer weight of its hanging fruit. The crop might even be much bigger than what you can consume in a season. What to do? For starters, yes, you can pick them all if you wish, at the peak of their freshness, and not lose one fruit of your entire crop to rot or neglect. For home-grow citrus trees, location will dictate the ideal picking season. In Northern California, for instance, early to mid-February is usually the best time to carefully pick the fruit one by one, so as to keep branches healthy for the next season.

Once all the fruit is down (limes, lemons, grapefruit, oranges etc.), you'll want to choose only the best of your crop and juice them one by one into a large bowl. I use a wood juicer, also called a wood reamer, it's simple, low-tech and gets it done fast. Once extracted, the juice needs to be strained. Over a pitcher, use a stainless steel or kitchen-grade nylon mesh strainer --stainless steel is important here, so your juice will not turn color-- to separate the pulp and pits from the juice itself. Once you're done with that, line up a dozen or more ice-cube sets and fill each cavity till about 3/4 of its full capacity with the strained lemon, lime or orange juice. Liquids like water etc. expand as they freeze, so you don't want to over-fill the ice-cube cavities. If the ice-cube sets are not equipped with their own cover, protect the top of each set with a freezer-safe paper or plastic wrap cut to tray-size and let freeze overnight. Try the interesting combinations of lime/orange, or lemon/orange, or grapefruit/orange, my favorite.

Each cube is more or less the equivalent of 3 tablespoons of liquid. Once frozen, mark each paper or plastic cover with a waterproof marker, to identify each tray's content. At some point during the year, neither your garden, your friends nor the produce-market will have any sweet-tasting lemons, limes or oranges any more. All you'll have to do to treat yourself or when a friend or family drops in on you for a joyful meal or happy cocktail hour, is to pull a few of these magical cubes . . . and start cooking!