Summertime and Lemonade

Since summertime is finally here, I have been having a hankering for things I am traditionally accustomed to drinking when the weather turns nice. I like learning new favorite things to drink or eat here in England, but I also find that having a bit of my own history is a great help in navigating the waters of an expat life. I think for me, that I am more able to embrace and be open to my new life here, when I am able to celebrate the parts of me that are of my own culture and marry them to things in my life here. Sharing two cultures with Brit Boy, I think, is a perfect metaphor for marriage which is the coming together of two to make one. I relish the opportunity that I have to know what I know already and then to learn new things too. It is great.

So lately I have been attempting to make tea and lemonade like I used to drink back home, which always brings summer to mind. I can get lots of hot tea here, but iced tea is not how most people drink it here and that is fine. I am very live and let live. (smile) So as with most things, I have been doing my best to rework recipes or techniques from back home when I need a connection to Georgia. Sometimes when I am baking or cooking a dish, I will have to either substitute ingredients and/or change the measurement of ingredients to make it work out right. This has been slowly worked out with many failed attempts. (smile) Also I have to take into account the temperature for baking certain things. Back home we use Fahrenheit and here they use Celsius, so that has to be converted. And understandably, since these are two different countries, some ingredients are not available here that I can get back in the States. This is not a problem though. I have now created my own sort of American Southern British cuisine. (smile) It’s cool.

So anyway, back to my quest of iced tea and lemonade. Well I found the lazy way out recently and have discovered that they are now selling iced tea in bottles here and I rejoiced the day that I found it. (smile) So I have that from time to time. I have been making lemonade from real lemons and it has been good, but then I kind of got obsessed with finding store bought lemonade for when I don’t feel like making it. So I have tried several kinds. They have lemonade here that is sparkly and it tastes fine. But I was looking for a more lemony variety. Brit Boy suggested that maybe what I was looking for was what they call cloudy lemonade here. So I tried a cloudy lemonade and it was more lemony, but still not what I was looking for. Although I think that I have found a new favorite drink to add to my summertime list with the cloudy lemonade. (smile) It is really tasty. Then one day, I was in the grocery store in the section where they have the orange juice and I noticed that they had a new product that was lemony, so on a whim, I bought it. And lo and behold when I got home and tried it, it tasted just like the lemonade that I make from scratch. Hallelujah!!! (laugh) Here is my “glass of summer” right before I am getting ready to drink it.



So in the end, I got two lemony drinks out of this quest…my lemonade like I remember from back home and a new friend in my British cloudy lemonade. So here’s to summers of old and this summer that is ahead of me and Brit Boy and to all of the summers yet to come.