Add zest to your day

WHEN you’ve eaten your orange, grapefruit, or tangerine, or squeezed out a lime into your tea or curry, don’t throw away the peel.

The colourful outer skin, called the “zest”, is an excellent flavouring. Take a grater and add the zest of your citrus fruits to 150g butter, 75g sugar and 225g plain flour to make sweetly scented citrus biscuits.

Bake in a medium hot oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Be careful, though. The white inner portion of the peel, the pith, is usually bitter, so don’t grate past the zest. If you’re watching your figure, add the zest to a small bottle of water and refrigerate. Alternatively, refrigerate the zest for up to 24 hours and add it into your coffee or tea.

If you have a whole peel left from chopping up a fruit, and you have a bowl of brown sugar in your fridge for your morning coffee that’s setting like a rock, add the peel to the bag. The zest will keep your sugar moist and give it an added perfume. However, the peel does deteriorate, so don’t leave it there for more than a few days.

For citrus peel that still have a bit of fruit sticking to it, use it as a rub to clean underneath your nails and to moisten your cuticles. If you’ve been chopping garlic, lemon and lime peels are especially useful for banishing lingering odour.

Citrus peels are also a little acidic, which is why they are excellent for cleaning odd wooden and plastic corners like windows catches, tiny ridges in your refrigerator door handle and so on. Just rub vigorously over the spot, then wipe dry with a cloth.