Last fall I wrote about autumn favorites like chai tea and apple cider -- drinks that perfectly fit a season. With spring in full bloom, here's what I'm sipping on the patio.
Pretty much anything with ice in it sounds tempting at the moment. It's been iced coffee weather for the past several days but at the moment my favorite drink is one-minute real lemonade.
I'm not big on powders of any sort, especially when it's a substitute for fresh fruit, and lemonade powder is the worst. Frozen lemonade concentrate is much too sweet for me. Thus I've gravitated towards the real thing.
One-minute lemonade is simply ice cubes in a medium-sized glass, the juice from a full lemon (I cut the lemon in two and use a dollar-store plastic fruit juicer), half of the remains of the juiced lemon, three tablespoons sugar and water to fill.
If that recipe seems familiar it's because it is the oldest one in the book. But while regular lemonade recipes call for stirring and refrigerating the lemonade, who has time for that?
I just place a small bar glass over the top of the glass I'm using,
create a seal and give it a 10-second cocktail shake, which in addition
to saving time, also creates delicious foam on the top that makes the
drink taste carbonated.
Then there's iced tea. Unlike lemonade, I'm not a
stickler for any particular type of iced tea because, like martinis, you're supposed to drink it uncomfortably cold. At that temperature it doesn't
matter if you're drinking the President's favorite Honest Tea or some Lipton black tea.
I
can practically hear iced tea purists spitting out their lemon wedges. Yes, loose-leaf tea tastes better and so do
expensive blends. But when you get iced tea around 40 degrees (I often
give iced tea a cocktail shake too, just for the hell of it) most of those
subtleties are lost. Plus using Lipton's, I have no qualms about
throwing away day-old tea. Fresh mediocre tea tastes better than old expensive tea.
As for how to make iced tea, I leave you in the competent but creepy hands of quasi-YouTube star's Steve Sutton. Yes Steve, it is a magical elixir of dreams ... and sometimes nightmares.
(Image via Flickr: Nostromoo)
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