Recipe: Homemade Lemonade

You will need:

• 6 lemons



• 200g sugar



• 2 1/2 pints of boiling water

Pare the outer zest from the six lemons and place in a large bowl (large enough to hold 2 1/2 pints of water!). Next squeeze all the juice out of the lemons and add to the zest, don't worry about pips and stuff at this point. Finally add the sugar and then the boiling water. Mix well until all the sugar has dissolved and then cover bowl with a tea towel and leave someplace cool overnight. Put the liquid through a rough sieve, to filter out the zest and the pips but still allow some of the 'fleshy bits' to go through. Voila! Tasty, yummy, full of vitamins, homemade lemonade. Great served with ice on a hot summers day (although probably not today as it is tipping down with rain!).

You can add more or less sugar according to taste, only remember if you try it when it is still hot it will taste quite sweet but by the time it is cool and ready to strain it will be nowhere near as sweet as when it was hot - if you kwim? I've experimented a little and find 200g of sugar, in the words of Goldilocks, to be just right! Not too sour to give you a pucker face, but not too sweet either, just a little bit of a zesty twang.

Oh, and for pink lemonade? Add a splash or two of pomegranate or cranberry or something red juice. Alternatively whizz it up with a few fresh strawberries.