Simple Food | Summertime Drinks

Iced tea, rhubarb soda, fresh mint, lots of ice

Lord A’mighty, loves. A couple hiccups in my writing schedule, followed by a full-on computer crash (I’m really hoping the fix-it people tell me it’s fixable!), together worked their darnedest to hijack the thing we both enjoy here. But goodess gracious, we’re gonna win, aren’t we? Enjoy the read.

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Summer’s arrived. When the sun stretches itself awake over the landscape, I’m often in the foothills watching the light fill in the day. I’m tugging weeds free in my garden as the earth heats, listening as the birds chatter over their plans. I’m at the creek bank for as many minutes as I can manage, breathing deeply, being still.

When the succession of blooms is the best parade, and I gather, gather, gather, petal confetti following me everywhere, and the dining table is abandoned for the picnic table because we simply cannot miss the experience of dining outside. Friends are invited, food prepared, drinks poured over ice.

It’s the summertime drinks that’ve been intriguing me lately. While I know there are entire store aisles stocked with every bottled and canned drink imaginable, it’s the drinks made at home that keep pulling my curiosity. This may very well be because I didn’t grow up drinking ready-made drinks. Our fridge wasn’t stocked with sodas, juices, seltzers, or alcoholic beverages. In summer, we made sun tea in a glass gallon jar. Sometimes, we’d mix up a pitcher of juice from frozen concentrate. There were always gallons of raw milk from Purdy’s dairy, into which we’d stir Hershey’s chocolate syrup for an occasional tasty chocolate milk to temper a hot summer day, and there was always ice cold well water, straight from the tap.

This summer, in my fridge the perpetual (half) gallon of iced tea of my youth has had an added twist, made with Newman’s Own black tea, instead of my childhood’s Lipton, and one bag of lemon ginger tea, then slightly sweetened with a scoop of monk fruit sugar, it’s the drink of summer memories, with a little sass.

Curiously, when you start thinking about homemade summer drinks, new finds or memories begin popping up everywhere, like bubbles in a glass. I remembered that many years ago, I’d read about the herbal iced tea Ina Garten offered at her specialty foods store, The Barefoot Contessa. She said they made and sold it by the gallon. Then, I remembered when Amanda Soule published her recipe for Ruby June (love the name), a celebration of June’s bounty of strawberries and rhubarb, on her blog, Soulemama, way back in 2009. (Leave out the tequila for an N/A version.)

Recently, a friend stood at my kitchen counter, and, while I gathered the food for our dinner outside, she pulled out a bottle of homemade rhubarb simple syrup, (here’s similar) poured it over ice in our glasses, and topped it with seltzer and fresh sprigs of mint (see them pictured above). All I could think was, How pretty! How fun! How delicious! (And, you could always make something similar, by the bigger batch, and serve a crowd.)

It’s been so fun, loves, a homemade summer drinks rabbit trail to happily skip along. With strawberries ripening in my garden, and my rhubarb still going strong, with a lifetime stock of Newman’s black teabags in the larder, mint growing wildly among the weeds along a fence, and new fruit coming into season (Cherries! Peaches! Nectarines!), inspiration for icy sipping from tall, chilled glasses is endless, indeed.

Do you have a favorite homemade summer drink? Do share!

P.S. The food I served alongside by friend’s yummy drink was this goat cheese galette and a tossed green salad.