Lemonade is the quintessential summer time drink in America, isn’t it? I absolutely love it and it will always remind me of my childhood days when I had my own lemonade stand outside of my house where I grew up. I set up a small table with my mom’s pitcher full of lemonade made from Country Time® lemonade packets, paper cups and napkins for every customer. Each cup was a quarter and my best customer was always our regular postman. Do kids still do this today?
Nowadays I don’t care for lemonade out of a packet, at most restaurants or from a bottle bought at the store. It is so super easy to make at home, but you just need to be patient about preparing a lot of lemons, of course.
As well as fresh mint.
To use lemons, you can add strawberries and make strawberry lemonade, like I made here.
What I do during this project of a recipe is to save all the lemon peels and dry them. They are so wonderful dried because you can use add them to hot boiling water to make tea or add them to soups and stews. You can even candy them, if you like.
To make the lemonade, add ice to a blender first. That’s sort of the rule of thumb when blending- get the iciest or frozen things at the bottom so the blades can start breaking those down first. If they’re on top, it’s nearly impossible for the blades and can actually ruin the motor of your blender if it works too hard like that.
Then add frozen strawberries, or fresh if that’s what you have.
Next, some cane sugar. I don’t like sweet drinks, so I go easy on the sugar but you can always add more if you prefer it sweeter.
Next some cool water.
Now squeeze all those lemons. I like to use my handy citrus press that I got from a local Mexican store.
Next, blend it all up in the blender for about 30 seconds to a minute and it’ll froth like this. But that will settle.
Just pour into serving pitcher or glasses directly.
Then add a sprig of fresh mint to flavor it even more.
That’s it- just a refreshing taste of summer every time.
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