Why grandma's recipe? After reading it on an American blog, I realized that our grandmothers are still very similar to the American ones in some ways, it's just that the latter had much more field for activities and tools. My grandmother also very often made similar lemonade for me and my younger sisters. She didn't know what rosemary and gin were, but the lemonade still turned out very tasty!
So, let's start with a standard lemonade, which may remind many of the taste of childhood.
Ingredients: 6 lemons, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup water, a pinch of salt and mint.
The cooking process: cut the zest from two lemons so that there is no white part left on it at all, and cut it into thin strips. Then put a saucepan on the fire, mix sugar with water, throw the zest in there and boil for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, cool a little and throw in a few mint leaves. When the syrup is completely cooled, you can send it to the refrigerator.
Squeeze the juice out of 6 lemons, take the finally cooled syrup out of the refrigerator, filter it (to remove the zest) and mix it with lemon juice.
You can dilute the resulting concentrated drink with water or unsalted mineral water with gas, you can add ice.
There can be quite a lot of variations of this simple lemonade and everything is just as simple. You can mix lemon juice with other citrus fruits (oranges, grapefruits, limes) in any proportions. I really love the taste and smell of cinnamon and vanilla, so when cooking syrup, you can add a small stick of cinnamon (or a pinch in the form of powder), a small piece of vanilla pod, or diversify the taste of lemonade with spicy lime zest.
When serving, lemonade can be decorated with a slice of lemon or orange, fresh mint leaves or a sprig of rosemary, whose coniferous taste gives piquancy. By the way, you can make lemonade for adults by adding a little gin to rosemary, and a drop of any citrus liqueur to mint.
I got syrup + juice = liter. If diluted with water to taste, then lemonade turns out to be about 3 liters — quite enough for a small company :)
