In our backyard we have a huge, beautiful orange tree and a tiny, sad looking lemon "tree". It's more like a bush than a tree and gives us about 20-25 lemons each season. That's plenty of lemons for us and I don't see the bush getting much bigger as it lives under the orange tree and in the shadow of a giant redwood tree.
The downside of having your own fruit trees is that all of the fruit is ready at roughly the same time so you have like a week or two to use everything. Or, like with the oranges (of which we had over 100lbs), you can bag them up and share them with friends. If you do share them, your friends will thank you for weeks for sharing your delicious produce :)
So, on Saturday, I went out with Elora and we picked all of the lemons left on the bush. This was our bounty
About 15 lemons, super ripe and ready to be used in all kinds of delicious recipes. I was inspired to finally pick all of the lemons when I saw this recipe for
lemon ricotta pancakes on
Pinterest Saturday morning.
I normally wouldn't get inspired by something like this recipe because I tend to like pretty plain, unexciting, familiar things. I like plain pancakes, so why would I go putting lemon and ricotta in them? Well, I happened to have some ricotta cheese in the fridge I needed to use up and I knew I had a ton of lemons just begging to be used, I decided to be adventurous.
To make it gluten free, I just subbed the wheat flour for Pamela's GF flour mix. It worked out great! I also used my waffle maker's flat plates for the griddle for the first time which was pretty exciting :)
The batter is pretty thick, next time I might add a little milk because I like my pancakes thin and crispy. But even on the thicker side, they were really delicious. Instead of the apples used in the original recipe for a topping, I used raspberry preserves. So yummy.
Elora devoured them.
I hope you check out the recipe and give it a try!
