When life (or friends) gives you lemons.....

Make Lemonade, Lemon Sorbet and Lemon Meringue Pie

Not so long ago we went to a friend's house for a bbq.  It was a lovely late afternoon and evening - grown up conversation, kids playing in the yard (and the little guy coming too close to a cactus more than once, lol) and just general relaxation.  My kids aren't known for keeping out of mischief though, and it wasn't long before they'd denuded this poor friend's lemon tree!  She very graciously let them bring all "their" lemons home.  They were soooo happy & proud of their harvest.

Ofcourse the big girl woke up first thing the next morning and started asking to make lemonade.  She asked and asked and asked and asked and asked, until finally I was ready (or I was just tired of hearing her ask).

I had to look up the recipe for lemonade, having never made it before - and what I found online seemed to be that the best recipe is this:

Lemonade
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 cup of lemon juice

* You heat the water in a pot and stir in the sugar until it dissolves.  Remove from the heat and add the lemon juice, and viola you have a wonderful lemonade concentrate. 

* You need to add quite a bit of water to dilute it before you actually drink it, but it's delicious :)

So our first step was to juice the lemons.  We only have a very low-tech old fashioned juicer, but it worked.  The kids tried hard to get some juice out, but in all honesty I did most of the real work.

Then we dissolved the sugar in the water - the little guy was FAR more interested in checking out his reflection in my shiny new pots than doing any stirring....

I meant to get pictures of the kids drinking their delicious homemade lemonade, but somehow it all got drunk before I did!

To make the Lemon Sorbet I just poured some of the lemonade concentrate into ice cube trays and froze it.  I put it in the blender when we were ready to eat it.  It turns out that it is pretty soft when frozen and gets quite runny when blended.  It was a nicer consistancy when we just put the lemonade ice cubes in a bowl & ate them.

 

That said, this lemon sorbet was VERY tart - too sour for the kids, or even for my husband.  I love sour stuff and thought it was delicious!  I'm sure there's a way to remedy that -more sugar maybe, or more water??

As for the Lemon Meringue Pie - we haven't made that yet, it's on the menu for dessert on Friday night.  I'll let you know how it turns out!!

Linking up here:

Bits & Bobs Robot

The Girl Robot

This is an activity that we do fairly often now that we've got the "kit" together.  "Once upon a time" we raided the The Man's toolbox and found a whole bunch of little metal bits & bobs - screws, nuts, bits of bike chain and various other things that we don't know what they are.  We had some empty, clean soup tins on hand and some magnets. All together you have the makings of many great & creative robots!! (and I add to this kit whenever I come across little lost bits of metal - hinges of things, lids to jars, bolts etc). I still have to watch the little guy pretty closely with this one, but he does enjoy it.   My big girl can spend quite some time getting her robot "just right".  Here's her with her latest robot creation - she added a paper skirt because this was a girl robot :)

The big girl with her robot making kit

Fairy Castle

I know I know, I've been away from this blog for ages.  I don't have a reasonable excuse, just that with summer here we've been even more busy than usual, and something had to give a little.  I'm still around, still doing arts & crafts and other fun stuff with the kids - I just haven't quite got around to posting it yet :)

So the other day (weeks ago now!) my lovely daughter & I set to making this fairy castle.  We saw some examples of fairy houses similar to this while at the County Fair, and thought it looked like a lot of fun - and it was!!  We got some tins (washed & dried) and my big girl arranged them in the best "castle" arrangement - she's rather particular, lol.  Then I hot glued them together and hot glued some craft sticks around all the tins. We also added some yogurt tubs on top of the towers.  I had thought we were going for the "woodland nature fairy" look - but once I let her go with the paint I realised I couldn't have been more wrong.  Being a 5yr old girl - she went with PINK!  And glitter, and sparkles too ofcourse!!  We just dug through my "bits & bobs" box to find stuff to decorate with.

For a surface we just flattened a regular old cardboard box, covered it with brown shipping paper and then painted that.  We added a pond (a little lid of a yogurt tub stuffed with tin foil and painted blue, for a shimmery water effect), a swing (made from craft sticks, yarn and scrapbooking embelishments) and a table (from a cork, cardstock and even legos for the chairs).

Finally we got some "woodland creatures" and a couple of fairies out of her toys!  A perfect, PINK fairy castle - hours of fun, and best of all I got to spend time creating something with my big girl.  My husband had taken the boy on a "boys" outing :) 

Truth be told, it didn't take more than a few minutes for the little man to take all the pretty marbles & stones off the tops of the "towers" - so don't leave a project like this unsupervised with little ones around!