Last month I had a chance to visit a fruit farm where chikoos, coconuts, mangoes and the likes are farmed and reach your dining tables through the markets. (What?, fruits come from somewhere else? I always thought they were magically created and placed on the shelves at Food Bazaar!)
Other than the usual chikoo, we came home with something very different. What you see on the cover image is me holding 3 lemons in my right hand. Got the picture? Now, compare it with this:
This is, what I call a megalemon, perhaps the biggest citrus I have ever seen. It’s not a lime (Mosambi, for us plebians), or a raw orange, but a lemon. An actual lemon. God knows what the farmer did with this, but these are non-chemically augmented naturally grown lemons.
If you’ve still not got the comparison input, here’re two of the Megalemons with two normal ones:
There’s no way these would stay fresh longer than a couple of days. So, we employed our juicer (which has since refused to work without a vacation at the repairman’s) to get the juice out and freeze it. Here’s what happened:
A vessel containing over one litre of raw lemon juice, four half rinds of two megalemons. Our maid took the rinds home, saying she’ll make awesome pickle out of them and share it with us.
That’s when it struck me – farmers would find it easier to grow such lemons and sell them to food factories – one plant, the same amount of nurturing, and the product is manifold.
Aah well, if anyone who has actually been on farmland longer than just a few hour-long visits has some more light to share on these Megalemons, please do. I’ll update the article and give you the credit.
Oh, how does the Megalemon juice taste? Lemony, in fact. What sold me to the fact that they weren’t anything other than lemons is that they taste exactly like a normal lemon does. Even the sourness is intact.
To close this article, let’s just see how three of these megalemons look when bullying three normal lemons bought from the roadside vendor:
So, when life gives you lemons, especially megalemons like these, just learn something new. And make massive amounts of lemonade.