Nothing says summer like lemonade, and last week I made some fresh cherry lemonade with my sister! She came to visit with her family for a few days and we had a great time swimming, cooking, eating, and singing songs that Julia (my niece) made up. I loved being able to spend some time with them and since it doesn’t happen that often, we made the most of it.

Cherry lemonade was the perfect way to incorporate some of the 75lbs of cherries Matt and I picked on the 4th of July. It sounds more crazy than it is. Okay, maybe it is that crazy, but we like it! We headed up to Singer Farms (which I would highly recommend visiting) and had a great time picking cherries which were so ripe and plentiful it was almost unbelievable. After canning and freezing most of the cherries we left a few pounds in the fridge to snack on and cook with. We used two different varieties – rainier and dark red sweet for this lemonade and it naturally made it the brightest red color. Lemonade is one of those things you make without a recipe – I think – so I’m not going to post one but I’ll give you a general sense of where to start. The three basic things you need: lemons, sugar + water. The sugar and water make simple syrup that you then combine with the lemon juice but you can be creative with additions or substitutions. I used appx. 1c water to 1/2 sugar and it was a little on the sweet side but perfect poured over ice. I poured a glass and added a paper straw for Julia to taste test. It was a hit.