Many recipes call for “the juice of 2 lemons”, for example. But when I have a surfeit of lemons, I pick a couple of large bags of them and squeeze and freeze them in ice cube trays. So “the juice of 2 lemons” doesn’t mean much to me… Today I decided to change that, using what I’ve just termed “lemon math”!
I picked 24 lemons, squeezed them, then poured them in to ice cube trays. Then I counted the ice cubes—70 from those 24 lemons, which works out at 2.91 lemon ice cubes per lemon. Close enough to three for me! So next time I get a recipe like that, I’ll know to use three of my lemon ice cubes to substitute for each lemon. (Yes, I could’ve looked this up on the internet, but hey, I had to juice those lemons anyway, so it was just as easy to do the math myself.)