Strawberry Lemonade

This is yet another post in my series of how to save money in the kitchen. I haven’t priced out how much this costs this time, because this is more about making do with what you have. If you have these few ingredients on hand or others (like grapes or other berries of some kind), it can be very inexpensive to make. Cheers!

Last weekend was our first official hot weekend of Spring. It was the kind of weekend where the air was sticky and warm, and where we wished that we had gone ahead and put in the air conditioners (no central AC for us). It was also a weekend where we thanked ourselves for having all the right ingredients to create a drink that was exactly what we needed: cool and refreshing.

I have to give my husband credit for this drink, because he had made it a few days prior (thanks for the idea, husband!).

Strawberry Lemonade

• 1 lemon, juiced
• 1 lime, juiced
• 6 – 10 strawberries, trimmed and sliced
• Agave nectar and/or stevia
• Water, cold
• Ice

Put ice into a pitcher. I filled our pitcher with probably about two or two and a half cups of ice.

Juice your lemon and lime straight into the pitcher.

Add the chopped strawberries to the pitcher.

Add sweetener to taste. My husband prefers to use stevia, which is a natural sweetener sans the sugar. You can purchase stevia as a powder or as an extract like this:

As you can see in the next picture, there are 1,440 servings in this little bottle, but we like our drinks sweet so we tend to use more than two drops a serving.

In this recipe I probably put about two full droppers of stevia liquid in the pitcher.

Next fill up the rest of the pitcher with water, and then stir everything together.

Let your pitcher of water sit for about 10 or 15 minutes prior to serving to let the flavor of the strawberries seep into the drink. You can also omit the ice if you won’t be serving immediately and let it sit for a few hours in your refrigerator. It will gradually turn a pinkish color and the strawberry flavor will be more pronounced.

The lovely thing about this drink, besides the fact that it’s refreshing, is that you can get really inventive with it and use really any type of fruit you have on hand. Either time we’ve made it we had strawberries, lemons and limes, but really, you could do most any fruit and it would turn out just as well.

Also, if you have an upcoming picnic, consider serving this in bell jars – it can be a nod to the eventual strawberry jam to come.

So if it’s hot, humid and you have no air conditioning make yourself some strawberry lemonade stat!

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