Cooking with Teenagers: Whole Fruit Strawberry Lemonade

 

This whole fruit strawberry lemonade has too much sweetener to be health food, but I declare that the whole fruit makes up for it, and it's so delightful and refreshing and yum--WAY better than powdered lemonade mix!

The kids and I have been making this strawberry lemonade together since they were small and I found the recipe online. I used to make the recipe as-written, including leaving the lemons unpeeled. We prefer to wing it now, so the lemonade is a little different every time. It's better to wing it, anyway, because lemons are always different sizes and strawberries are always sweeter or less sweet than the last time, so the amount of sugar required is always going to be different. And I don't usually buy organic, so I do prefer to peel the lemons. Anyway, putting lemon peels down the garbage disposal makes the kitchen smell awesome!

The one fancy piece of equipment that you might need is one of those super-powerful blenders. I bought a refurbished Vitamix a billion years ago (or at least a decade ago, which is the exact same thing), and it's still the best thing in my kitchen. The only thing I've ever had to do for it is replace the pitcher after I, myself, dropped the lid plug into the blender while it was running and cracked the pitcher and tomato soup flew EVERYWHERE.

So I don't know if you exactly *need* the world's best blender to make this recipe, but I've only ever used the world's best blender to make it, so your mileage may vary, as the kids say.

This recipe that the kids and I use makes one completely full blender pitcher of lemonade.

You'll need:

• 2-4 fresh lemons, depending on their size. 
• around a quart of fresh strawberries, tops removed. Sometimes I'll cap these fresh, put them in a quart-sized plastic baggie in the freezer, and pull them out to use frozen.
• sugar to taste. If I'm in charge of the sugar, I'll use more like .5-.75 cup. If a kid is in charge, they inevitably dump in a full cup of sugar without even tasting the lemonade first.
• water.

The goal is to fill the blender pitcher maybe halfway full with fruit, at least half of that lemons. Peel the lemons, but otherwise just toss the whole fruit into the blender:

Strawberries, as well, should be capped, but otherwise just throw them in.

Next, add water to just below the maximum fill line of the blender.

If I'm making the lemonade, I'll blend it, then taste it, then add sugar and blend again until I like the taste. The kids don't even bother--they dump in a full cup of sugar along with the fruit.

Blend the lemonade on high to pulverize the fruit:

There are also lemon seeds in there that you'll be pulverizing, which is why you might need a high-power blender. Even on the days when we've not done such a thorough job and we've been left with a seed bit or two in our drinks, though, I've never heard the kids protest, and they can be picky about fruit.

Blending the drink at such a high speed makes it a little foamy. You can skim that off or politely ignore it:

Pour the lemonade into a Mason jar filled with ice, add a glass straw, and enjoy your summer day!

I keep meaning to try this recipe with fruits other than strawberries--I think cherries or blackberries would be absolutely delicious--but strawberries are so bountiful right now that I've never gotten around to it. We do have a bit of a watermelon problem going on at the moment, though--why is it that every time I buy a watermelon, the kids eat themselves sick on it as soon as it's cut, and then I essentially have to force-feed them the rest of it before it goes bad? And then a week later they're asking for watermelon again? 

So maybe my next experiment will be to make Whole Fruit Strawberry Watermelon Lemonade? I wonder if it would taste good with boba?