Ingredients:
- 2 C sugar
- 1 C water
- 3 lemon rinds cut into thin strips
- Juice of 8 lemons
- optional extras for experimentation – cloves, basil, various fruits
The final product is a syrup that you add to bubbly water (club soda, seltzer, etc).
Directions:
Add sugar water and lemon rinds to a saucepot. Bring to a boil for 5 minutes. Cool. Add the juice of 8 lemons. Strain. Store. Use 2 Tbls of final syrup for every glass of bubbly water. (Go SodaStream! If you don’t have one – get one or put it on your wish list. They make great presents.) Bob added some cloves to a recent batch and that was a nice twist. A local chef extraordinaire makes basil lemonade. mmmmm that is good. Some folks like strawberries or raspberries or cucumber or watermelon in their lemonade so, go on and get wild with it. It’s lemonade!
Comments:
I’m serious about lemonade because hey, you have to be serious about something.
This came from one of those pink flowery books on living better through gratitude or something like that. I made this a few times and loved it. I then ventured into making it on an extended family vacation. It ended up as some kind of an embarrassing sour mess because my dyslexic brain reversed the sugar and water quantities. So now I always double-check the recipe and I make it all the time. It’s best to use real lemons and not just that stuff in a plastic container.
Also – just a little story here – the SodaStream first came into the MT Jaffe house in 2007 thanks to Bob. I was feeling guilty about all the bottles left from club soda and San Pellegrino. We saw a movie I recommend, but can’t speak for how it stood the test of time. Haven’t seen it in a long while. “Blast from the Past” has a really fun non-related dance scene below.
Anyway, one of the scenes showed a party with their nice home bar that included a club soda maker. We figured if they could do it, we could too. Bob went to the Internet and then to the hardware store and made the Frankenstein of bubbly-water makers. It required us to pilfer the paintball gun air cartridges which made the boys mad. Eventually, the novelty wore off for us and we discovered the modern solution to the situation in SodaStream. All has been well ever since.