If It Quacks Like a Duck

As I mentioned last time, our Cara Cara orange tree turned out not to be oranges.  So now we have mystery fruit.  The fruit is large, yellow, and the rind is nearly an inch thick. It looks and tastes like an overgrown lemon. Could it be a Ponderosa lemon tree? At first, we thought it might be a pomelo, but most of the information we could find claims that pomelos are sweet.  So, do we have a ponderosa lemon or pomelo tree? We may never know for sure. At right is a picture of our first harvest.

Probably the biggest drawback to this tree is the fact that it will get huge, and has enormous thorns. The other day when I picked them, I ended up with scarred up hands. Guess I should have worn some leather gloves. I'll remember that next time. This was a particular problem when it came time to begin juicing the fruit, because the juice stung every scratch or prick on my hands. Eventually I remembered the cleaning gloves I had bought at the Dollar Tree. They saved the day, and my hands. With some help from my strapping 6'-3" stepson, so far we have frozen about a gallon of juice. 

The cake stuck to the pan,
but it still tastes great!

I have used the juice and zest in recipes as if they were lemon. It tastes just like lemon to me, and the meringue pie and "lemon" pound cake both tasted exactly like lemon.

Now I need to find lots of recipes to use up all this lemony goodness. It surely has lots of vitamin C and other good stuff, so why not?  I can't continue making pies and cakes and other goodies; all of us need to lose some poundage and sweets are counterproductive.