Welcome to Lemon Week

Mike came home from work one day with a handful of lemons. His co-worker, Cheryl, has a lemon tree and heeps of lemons to unload.

I don't think he expected my eyes to light up when I saw them. He didn't realize that during the past few weeks, as I perused through cookbooks, recipe after recipe jumped out at me and then disappointed me. I was being drawn to all kinds of lemon recipes, but I was lacking a key ingredient: lemon juice.

I just don't usually have lemons or lemon juice on hand. Yet it's getting hot in Phoenix (we've already broken our first heat record of the year), so all these lemon recipes sounded so refreshing.

I whipped up a lemon loaf (stay tuned for that recipe on Monday). That got Kristin and I talking about the finer points of baking with lemons. Lemon bars, lemon cookies, lemon streusel... you get the idea.

That's when it hit us. We knew what we needed. We needed a lemon week.

So here it is, one week dedicated to the wonder that is the lemon. Starting tomorrow, we'll have a new lemon recipe each day through Saturday. If you just can't bear to wait until tomorrow to start whipping up your lemon concoctions, you can start with the White Chocolate Chip Lemon Cookies that Kristin posted about a few weeks back.

Enjoy!