When Life Gives You Lemons…

It’s time to make lemonade! Does the internet need another lemonade recipe? Probably not. Am I going to share my own one anyway? Of course!

Lemons are a wonderful fruit, and they are packed with goodness, most notably vitamin C. They are excellent for your respiratory system, as well as digestion.

I love lemon drinks. When I was little, my Dad would make me lemon & honey tea when I was sick. As a teenager, Sprite was my poison of choice, and when I was pregnant with my first child, it was lemon high juice that managed to slightly ease my “morning sickness” in the afternoon. I never found a cure for morning sickness, but I was glad to have found something that would occasionally ease the symptoms until I found a more acceptable place to lose whatever I had left in me.

By the time I was pregnant the second time, lemon high juice was getting hard to find. Suddenly, the range of drinks you could get without sweeteners went from “almost all of them”, to only orange. By the time I was growing number three, *if* you could find orange, it was more than twice the price of the rest. Fun times. I will definitely do a full on rant one day about sugar tax and sweeteners, but for today I will just tell you that I don’t like them. Some make my throat itch, some close my chest, and some of the “natural” ones make me more thirsty than I was before I drank anything. I prefer a choice, and my choice is sugar.

While I did not find the answer to my nausea blues, I do have the answer to delicious lemony drinks. Home made lemonade. My 6 year old loves lemonade just as much as me (wonder why?), and asked me to make some over the holidays. So, I decided it was time to perfect the recipe, and document it for future reference.

Lemonade is simple enough. All you need is lemon juice (preferably from fresh lemons), sugar and water. Most recipes call for equal amounts of lemon juice and sugar, but I find that too sweet. I use half the amount of sugar. Common sense and efficiency will tell you to make the sugar syrup, then juice the lemons while the syrup is cooling. Experience will tell you that you never know how much lemon juice you will get out of a pack of lemons, so you may end up with twice as much syrup as you needed to begin with. (In this experiment I got about 3/4 of a cup from 3 large lemons, and topped it up to a cup with the “bits”). If I had stopped to think, I would have only used half the syrup and added cocoa powder to the other half for a chocolate syrup, but I did not. So, here is my way of making lemonade:

1. Gather your lemons (as many as you want to use), and juice them. Roll them around a bit in your hands before hand to increase their yield.
2. Measure how much juice you have managed to squeeze out of those lovely lemons.
3. In a saucepan, pour in cold water, and granulated sugar. The amount you need of each will be half the amount of juice you made. Eg, if your lemons gave you 100ml of juice, use 50ml of water and 50ml of sugar.
4. Stir the mixture over a low heat, until all the sugar is dissolved.
5. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove from the heat and let it cool. As you have already juiced the lemons, use this time to catch up on your favourite blog sites or facebook pages. Don’t Netflix or you may forget what you were doing.
6. Pour your lemon juice into your sugar syrup, and mix it up. If you want to freeze it, now is the time. (You don’t want to waste freezer space with extra water!)
7. Dilute to taste, and enjoy! I can’t give you quantities here, it’s a personal thing. Start with a 1:4 ratio and work your way up (or down) until you find the perfect strength for you.

If you are craving the delicious taste of a lemon drink but don’t have the time or ingredients to make lemonade, you could use lemon essential oil. Add just one drop of lemon oil to a glass of water, and enjoy. As lemon oil is pressed from the skin of the lemons, and we’ve made the lemonade from the juice, their health properties will be slightly different, so neither is a direct replacement of the other.
doTERRA essential oils are pure and potent (and the only ones I’d recommend for adding to food & drink!) As such, just one drop can pack a powerful health boosting punch. It has cleansing benefits, and can help both the respiratory system & digestive function. You will need to make sure you use a glass or stainless steel receptacle, the oil can extract the toxins out of your plastic one & add them to your drink.

So, here’s a quick recap of our lemony goodness options:

1. Squash or High Juice. Pros: ~Easily available (if you like sweeteners).~ Easy to use. ~Stores well. Cons: ~Almost impossible to get without sweeteners, and if you can, it’s very pricey. ~Other preservatives added, which can be bad for your health. £ = 5p per 200ml serving, based on using a no added sugar one at a dilution of 1:4 as per instructions.
2. Home made lemonade. Pros: ~ You can control the amount of sugar, and therefore the sweetness. ~ All the health benefits of fresh lemon juice. ~ It’s fun to make! Cons: It’s less convenient having to make it yourself. ~Shorter shelf life (if you have good self control). ~Needs to be stored in the fridge. ~ You need to go shopping, or have the ingredients to hand. £ = 12.5p per 200ml serving depending on season, brand & other variables.
3. Lemon essential oil. Pros: ~ Wide ranging health benefits. ~ It’s alkali, not acidic, so no worry about teeth damage! ~ It’s convenient to make up, just open the bottle & add a drop to your glass. Cons: ~Essential oils do not contain vitamins. ~ Scientifically, oil & water don’t mix. So, you’ll have to remember to shake it up or stir again if you don’t down it all in one go. ~ Not recommended for children under 6. £ = 3.7p per drop, based on a 15ml bottle.

Once of the most important factors though, is taste. And that is down to personal preference. What’s my personal preference? Lemonade! What’s your preference?

If you decide to try my recipe, please let me know how it goes! You can comment either directly on this post, or on my Nicky Goes Natural Facebook page.

If you would like to buy a bottle of lemon oil, go to http://www.mydoterra.com/nicolastanton and click “join & save”. Lemon comes in the Home Essentials kit, Family Essentials kit, Intro kit, and Beginners Trio. Get in touch if you need help deciding which is the best way for you to get started. Lemon oil is also available to purchase separately.