So many times I have bought a fresh lemon for a recipe that called for lemon juice, but I only needed half of the lemon. I would put the other half in the fridge, but it would turn mushy and moldy before I was able to use it. Lemons cost money, and I hated throwing money away. Of course you can buy little bottles of lemon juice. But preservatives sometimes irritate my stomach, and it really doesn’t have that wonderful flavor of fresh lemon juice. I tried a natural powdered lemon juice for a while, to which you add water.

It had fairly decent flavor, but it always ended up getting hard as a rock after a while. Maybe there is some way to keep it from doing that. If you used it up more quickly, it could work. In a pinch, you can use a little lemon extract, if you have some. It tastes somewhat different, since it is made from extracting oil from the lemon peel. It is also more concentrated, so you should only use about a quarter as much as you would of fresh lemon juice. You can add enough water to make up for the smaller amount of liquid, if the exact amount of liquid is crucial to the success of the recipe.

After having to throw away a moldy half of a lemon, I would come across another recipe I wanted to use that called for lemon juice and would wish I still had that other half of the lemon. For instance, I have a zucchini-chocolate chip muffin recipe and a French dressing recipe that require lemon juice. Enough of that! I decided to find a solution.

​I started taking the left-over half of the lemon and squeezing out the juice. Then I would put a tablespoon of lemon juice in one section of an ice cube tray. Sometimes there would be enough juice to put a tablespoon in each of two sections. Then I would put the ice cube tray in the freezer. When frozen, the lemon “ice cubes” don’t pop out as easily as regular ice cubes. I don’t know the scientific reason for that, but I pry them out with a knife. Then I put them in a little snack-size plastic zip bag in the freezer. Now when another recipe calls for lemon juice, if I have any lemon “ice cubes” stored up, I can pop one in a little glass bowl and defrost it in the microwave on low heat. It not only saves money for the cost of the lemon, but it might save me time and gas for an extra trip to the store.