Andrea Aguilar thought her grandfather left her little beyond the memory of the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic that he left for the United States as a middle-aged man. But years after he died, Aguilar happened upon an invention of his, which could soon turn her life around: a lemon peeler. In fact, it's a rudimentary gadget that combines a lemon peeler with a grater and a little box, forming an object that creates and holds perfectly sized lemon zest for cookies, cakes, sauces and other foods. "My mom apparently used it all the time for her rice pudding, and other dishes, but I'd never seen anything like that, and absolutely nothing in the stores," Aguilar said. A self-employed home-services provider, she filed for a patent and won it, hoping that she would quickly make a business out of the peeler.