Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Two for Tuesday: Strawberry Lemonade & Peanut Butter Pie

Two for Tuesday is back!

One of my goals for myself while I'm on a self-imposed Facebook fast is to get back to regular posts on my blog.

Thus, the return of Two for Tuesday :)

First up..... strawberry lemonade.

This stuff is to die for! We had some strawberry lemonade at Longhorn Steakhouse (where we went for our anniversary dinner.) It was yummy, so I found a recipe on my phone. We stopped and picked up strawberries and lemons on our way home. The next day was Saturday. The Jedi ran the smoker and put three racks of ribs in. We had another family over for dinner, and I made this strawberry lemonade.

The drink we had a Longhorn was good.....the homemade stuff was much much much better.

Warning, it can be a bit labor intensive, so I recommend recruiting a couple of children to help. I'm all about free child labor.

Ingredients
  • 1 1/2 cup sugar, divided
  • 4 cups water, divide
  • 2 cups fresh strawberries, hulled
  • 1 cup fresh lemon juice (4 to 5 lemons)
Directions

  1. Combine one cup of sugar and one cup of water in a small sauce pan. Heat and stir until sugar is dissolved and mixture is clear. Remove from heat and let it cool.
  2. Rinse and hull your strawberries. (Or give this task to an older child to be working on while you are making the sugar syrup.)
  3. Put strawberries and one cup cold water in a food processor. Run it till the mixture is pretty smooth. Transfer to a pitcher and stir in 2 more cups of cold water.
  4. Cut your lemons in half and juice them. THIS IS NOT THAT HARD, even without a fancy juicer. Check out this video on how to juice lemons with a fork. (And again, grab a couple of kids to help.)
  5. Pour the cup of lemon juice and the cooled sugar syrup into the pitcher and stir.
  6. You may know chill the mixture for up to 8 hours. (It will need stirred again before you pour it.) OR you can serve it right away. 
  7. Either way, when you are ready to serve, fill clear glasses two-thirds full with ice. (Yes, the glasses do need to be transparent; this is too pretty to hide behind opaque plastic.) Then pour your homemade strawberry lemonade over the ice. I like to pop a pretty colored straw in the glasses too. This will make enough to fill 8 glasses. 
And my second recipe for the day is...peanut butter pie. 

This one is nice for these last dog days of summer because it doesn't require much, if any, baking. I threw this together at the last minute when I needed something to take to a friend's house. I didn't have a prepared graham cracker crust on hand, so I made one. Sweetling and the Jedi don't care for chocolate, so using Oreos as a crust wasn't an option. (I did have heavy cream on hand. I pilfered the Jedi's ice cream making ingredients and bought another carton for him from the store the next day.)

Here's the recipe I used, and aside from swapping out the crust, I followed it and it worked perfectly. It's late, and I'm lazy, so I'm just going to post a link.

I didn't put shaved chocolate on the top, but I did make the hot fudge sauce to put on slices. The hot fudge sauce was ok, but it wasn't Heggy's. I'm still on a quest to find a hot fudge sauce recipe comparable with Heggy's. I also made a strawberry sauce from scratch, for the non-chocolate lovers....but I was told that the strawberry did not go with the pie as much as I thought it should. I was told that caramel would have been a better topping option. 

1 comment:

Tracy said...

That lemonade sounds delish!