May 24: Old-Fashioned Lemonade
A perfect day for it.
Memorial Day weekend is probably one of the most perfect times to make homemade lemonade. Especially if you aren’t going anywhere. I knew last night that I wanted to make lemonade today, and was really hoping it could be an easy recipe I could knock out.
Luckily for me, I found one after a lot of digging through cookbooks.
I made old-fashioned lemonade from my cookbook The Portable Feast: Picnic, Lunch Box and Knapsack Fare.
First, a little about this cookbook since it is the first time I’ve mentioned it on here. It is one that isn’t indexed on the eatyourbooks.com website. Because of the number of cookbooks I own, this makes it hard for me to cook from. I use that website a lot to look up what I can make with certain ingredients that I have on hand or a basic idea of what I want (linguine the other night, for instance).
But with a centaur on the cover, it is a whimsy cookbook that called my name at an Estate Sale years ago. I’m glad I got it, but I wish I used it more.
This time, none of my indexed cookbooks had a lemonade recipe (weird!) so I had to look through my non-indexed books and found one in this. It was perfect because it wasn’t the way I normally make lemonade.
Which brings me to the recipe.
I normally opt for a heavy lemon, tart lemonade. This is truly an old-fashioned lemonade in how sweet it is. It is made with a simple syrup that includes lemon peel (that you strain out before adding to the lemon juice and water.)
The recipe called for 3/4 cup fresh lemon juice, and I could have easily handled 1-1 1/4 cups instead. The kids loved it, and I do think the simple syrup made with the lemon peel was a good call. Just a little more lemon juice for me next time.
Tomorrow I am thinking we maybe barbeque and I will make a side dish from a cookbooks - but that could also work for Monday. Maybe a dessert the other day…