A Lemonade Stand & Grandma Woodall’s Marmalade Cookies
It was a good weekend, if busy. It may sound like the picture of domesticity, in fact, when I recap: coffee to go and some good, artsy garage sale-ing Saturday morning, at which W (finally!) became the proud owner of a Slap-Chop – a real one, not the 1950s version my Grandma had that he took one look at and declared “not the real thing”. (He has been asking for one since Christmas. When he got the Graty that came with it, he turned to me and said, “hey Mom! You can put your cheese in it, you can keep it in the fridge and fuggedaboutit!” in full-on New York slang.)
Then, a discovery that I’ve decided after much inner searching to share with you: fruit-filled hand pies at Bliss & Co. bakery in Chinatown: THE BEST EVER. (Also: really nice people there. Which is always an added bonus.) It was all I could do to take a few snaps before devouring one of those cherry pies. OK, both of them. They are every bit as good as they look.
This morning the boys decided they wanted to have a lemonade stand. We pulled out the old mixer with juicer attachment my sister acquired at some antiques/curios shop ages ago, which is pulled out a few times per summer for this purpose and no other. I realize it sounds a bit Martha to set up a four and seven year old with an antique juicer and bowl of lemons for their stand (you’ll be relieved to hear we didn’t serve it in our vintage jadeite glassware), but it beats Kool-Aid or even frozen lemonade concentrate hands-down. The boys love the process of taking an order, then juicing a lemon half directly into a glass over ice, and adding sweetened water. It’s the Real Thing. They know how to turn a lemon, sugar and water into lemonade.
If you don’t have a vintage juicer, here’s how to make it from scratch from fresh lemons. (Tip: if you zap your lemons in the microwave for 20 seconds, they’ll release far more juice.)
Freshly Squeezed Lemonade: To make a lemon simple syrup, simply heat equal amounts of lemon juice and sugar in a small pan until the sugar dissolves. (6 large lemons will give you about a cup of juice.) Cool completely and keep in the fridge. To make lemonade by the glass, pour a couple tablespoons into a glass with ice, then add water (tap or sparkling) to taste. To make a pitcher, mix 1 part syrup to 5-6 parts water.
We mixed up a batch of my Grandma Woodall’s Marmalade Cookies to put out in a bowl, and as they baked the boys painted their signs. When I asked how much they planned to sell their lemonade for – curious what price tag they might put on their wares – they said they wanted it to be free. When I asked why, they said they already had enough money. So they painted “free lemonade” signs.
(They still got $3 in tips. Ben said he wanted to give it to someone who didn’t have any money, so we’ll pass it on to the food bank.)
Dinner was pizza from Roma’s in Bridgeland – a place I hadn’t tried before, but was recommended by someone via Twitter. (Thanks, social media.) We got the Funghi, topped with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, provolone, mushrooms and prosciutto crudo. Salty and yummy, with a Roman-style crust (thin, with no rim).
And of course we nibbled on cookies all afternoon. I hadn’t made this particular recipe in ages – but it seemed fitting to pull out one of my Grandma’s recipes on a day when it seemed all of the birds in the neighbourhood came out to sing. (She loved birds, and could identify them all.) I love the scraps of paper that have her hand-written recipes on them (often with phone numbers and other notes to herself), but you might find it hard to decipher – you can find the typed-out-for-you version of the recipe here.
May 16 2010 | beverages | 23 Comments »
