I chose to plant a lemon tree for two diametrically opposed reasons. The first being the Fat Flush Diet, which requires drinking fresh lemon in warm water several times a day to help cleanse your system and lose unsightly fat, and to make paparajotes, or deep-fried lemon leaves.

So I set out to choose a lemon tree, and though I like Meyer lemon trees because they are so prolific and reliable, they are not a real lemon tree--it's thought to be a cross between a true lemon and a mandarin orange. The other two choices at the nursery were the Eureka lemon and the variegated pink lemon. The pink lemon is a prettier tree--with green and yellow leaves and the new growth and buds are burgundy. But the reason I chose it, is that it has the most fragrant leaves. The leaves of the Meyer had almost no scent, the Eureka a nice fragrance, but the pink variegated had the fullest, most robust lemony smell.

In an article published in the New York Times on the different varieties of lemons in California, the author David Karp writes "The most tantalizing alternative lemon is the Variegated Pink. A mutant found on an ordinary Eureka lemon tree in Burbank, Calif., around 1930, its immature fruit has green and white stripes; the older fruit loses the stripes and develops flesh pigmented pink from lycopene, which also colors pink grapefruit. The trees are usually poor producers, perhaps because their variegated leaves are low in chlorophyll.

The few available Variegated Pinks fetch $6 a pound wholesale in New York, where restaurants like DavidBurke & Donatella snap them up. They taste much like regular lemons, though when mature can be less acidic, with a tutti-frutti flavor."

The reason that I chose the leaf over the fruit is because lemons are cheap and plentiful at the grocery store, but you can only find paparajotes at the harvest festival in Murcia, Spain being cooked up by old-school grandmothers. Or you learn to make them yourself.

Recently, I visited the town of Murcia, which near Spain's Mediterranean Coast. Located between Andalusia and Valencia, it's known as "la huerta de Europa" or the orchard of Europe, the fertile valleys near Murcia produce everything from artichokes and fava beans to Calasparra, the slow growing rice used to make paella.

I happened to be there while the town's harvest festival was going on. People spilled into a pedestrian walkway and stopped off at wine tastings and food stalls that represented the area. We searched a bit, but then found women making paparajotes. These are lemon leaves that are battered, and then deep-fried like a doughnut in large vats that resembled woks. After they've puffed up and turned golden, they are then dredged in sugar and cinnamon. The deep fried leaves are served wrapped in a paper cone. You fish out the hot, greasy leaf, and eat the fried dough off of the leaf--kind of with the same intent as an artichoke leaf. The effect is marvelous. The fresh flavor and scent of lemon are faint, but infuse the dough, giving the this "doughnut" a light, delicate flavor.

Hence, the pink lemon tree and the fat flush.