Quick and Easy Food Preservation Project

As the title of my blog suggests, I am a stay at home wife. I use natural ingredients for cleaning as much as possible. One of the things I use is lemons. They are a great natural bleach to get stains off of your counter tops. You can use them to scrub a wooden cutting board for disinfection. You can simmer them on your stove for air freshening.

When I use them for cleaning I hate to throw the zest away. I searched around for instructions to preserve them and found out how to easily dry the zest.

Use a regular vegetable peeler to peel the zest from the lemon taking care not to peel the pith (white part of the peel). The pith is bitter and would not taste good in your food.

Lay the pieces on a paper towel and allow to air dry for a few days.

You can then use this dried zest in any dish that calls for fresh zest. I assume you could do this with any citrus fruit such as oranges, limes and grapefruit. It is a good addition to tea and I have dropped them into a bowl of water and warmed with my candle warmer.

I store my zest in a little canning jar in my cabinet.



This is how it looks all dried out.