Hooray! Lemonade!

Thanks to The Joy of Cooking, I have finally, actually made lemonade at home.

I grew up with the powdered or frozen concentrate kind, and I've found myself buying bottled lemonade, or the kind in a carton, over the last few years. This was frustrating, because my tastebuds tell me it's basically a simple drink, and I've been using more fresh citrus in my cooking.

But my experiements with mixing fine-ground sugar, citrus, and water have been pretty sketchy so far.

Well, tonight while making dinner, I ran across a bag of frozen cranberries my partner and I purchased last fall when we decided to try making our own cranberry lemonade. Curious, I pulled my trusty Joy of Cooking off the shelf.

In the Joy of Cooking version, there are two steps. The first is to make sugar syrup. This is the step I've always tried to weasel around. But we were cooking anyway. So I put the cup of water and two cups of sugar in a pan. A few minutes later, the sugar was completely disolved, and dinner was ready. So I put the cranberries in, turned the temp down and put the lid on, and sat down at the table.

When we were done eating, the cranberries were putting off a lovely sweet/tart aroma. I poured the syrup through a strainer into a bowl.

To turn this into lemonade, I put half a cup of water into a glass. I added two spoons of syrup, and a spoon of lemon juice.

It was terrific! And so simple I feel foolish for settling for sugar and artificial flavors for so long. ;-) Well, that's the name of this project. Try it and figure out whether it makes life simpler and better or not.