Lemonade

I kept telling my kids we would make lemonade as a bag of lemons from Costco sat waiting on the kitchen counter.  One morning we took a break from music practice, library trips and family baseball time and spent a summer morning making old-fashioned lemonade.  My four year-old got his turn to help juicing, and my almost one year-old absolutely LOVED his job of mashing lemons.  He was not happy at all when it was time to be done smashing up the lemon slices.

I looked at several recipes and decided to try two recipes that used very different methods to make lemonade.  One was from the Cooks Illustrated Cookbook.  It involved the aforementioned mashing of thinly sliced lemons with sugar, then straining it and adding water.  The idea is that mashing the whole lemons with sugar will help the sugar completely dissolve and the citrus oils from the lemons will give the lemonade a wonderful citrus flavor.  Well, I don't know if my baby and I mashed the lemons too much and the white pith gave off a bitter flavor, but both my kids and I thought the flavor was way off on this lemonade.

We all enjoyed the classic sweet-tart lemonade adapted from a recipe on allrecipes.com.  The recipe calls for boiling the water and sugar to ensure that the sugar dissolves completely, then adding lemon juice and water.  My kids took their taste testing job very seriously, and it was hilarious to hear my four year-old ask specifically for the "allrecipes" lemonade.

Lemonade
Ingredients:
3/4 cup sugar (I may try cutting this down by a couple tablespoons and see if it' still sweet enough)
4 cups water, divided
1 1/4 cups lemon juice (from about 6 lemons)

Directions:
In a small saucepan combine sugar and 1 cup water.  Boil and stir to dissolve sugar.  Cool to room temperature.  Cover and refrigerate until chilled.  (I might try adding ice to speed this up if needed.)

Remove seeds from the lemon juice.  Strain out pulp if desired.  In a pitcher stir the chilled sugar syrup, lemon juice and remaining 3 cups water.

Source: adapted from allrecipes.com