Toasted Lemons?

 This is not a recipe for toasted lemons. I'm not even sure what that would mean. Here's what I mean by toasted:

Chris and I are huge Mad Men fans. In the very first episode of Mad Men, Don is in a meeting with executives from Lucky Strike cigarettes, and they're trying to come up with a new way to market cigarettes in the face of research that links smoking with cancer. To establish the brilliance of Don's marketing mind from the get go, Don asks the president of Lucky Strike, "how do you make your cigarettes?" The guy says, "We grow the tobacco, cut it, cure it, toast it..." Don interrupts: "Lucky Strike--it's toasted." The guy responds, "but everybody else's tobacco is toasted." Don smiles with that I'm-smarter-than-you-and-magic smile and says, "No, everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike's is toasted." Thus, Chris and I have adopted "toasted" as a descriptor for BS advertising gimmicks. For example, most (all) cosmetics are toasted. Beer is toasted. Yogurt is toasted.

Okay, now that you're up to speed on toasted, on to the lemons.

Meyer lemons are really sexy in the food blogosphere. I've often seen them and thought that they might be the emperor's new clothes of food blogging (I have similar suspicions about salt, but that's another post). I've never seen them at the grocery store and assumed that they weren't sold in small-town grocery stores. Anyway, last night I saw them at the grocery store and figured I'd find out for myself if they were toasted or if there was actually a meaningful difference.

The colour makes them look more like oranges than lemons, and the skin is much smoother than that of a standard lemon. Worth an extra twenty cents per lemon? Not to me. We cracked one open when we got home and compared it to a regular lemon. The colour was a bit different on the inside too (Meyer on the left, regular on the right above), but I still wasn't convinced.

Then, I smelled it.
It was really different! Somehow, it smelled like fresh thyme and baking a cake at the same time. By comparison, the regular lemon smelled like it would be a gumdrop if you added sugar and a cleaning product if you added soap (This is not a bad thing. It just means that science has done a better job with lemon smell and lemon flavour than they have with cherry or watermelon).

So there you go. Meyer lemons: not toasted. Different than regular lemons. Fellow bloggers, I'm sorry I doubted you. I'll have to scout around for a recipe. Maybe I'll preserve them. Maybe I'll make lemon pie. Mmmmm.... lemon pie.....

By the way, it wasn't as easy to discern a difference between the lemons by tasting. When you lick a lemon, it mostly just tastes sour.


Pairs nicely with tequila.