TT - Limoncello

Welcome to the second installment of Tasty Tuesday. I’ve already received a few yummy looking recipes to try in the near future. Thanks for those that contributed, and for those that haven’t, its not too late! I'm always looking for new ones! (thefloatingviolin@gmail.com)

Today’s recipe is actually not a food, but a drink. An Italian liqueur. (Those who are under 21, don’t despair – I have a section for you, too)

Limoncello (from RP)
This process actually takes 17 days, so I’m just writing about the first step today. Stay tuned for the next couple steps in the next Tasty Tuesdays!

Ingredients:
Zest from 12 large lemons
1 liter of pure alcohol (everclear)
750g sugar
(I’m giving you the amounts that I’m personally using – you can adjust them to make however much you want)

Peel the stickers off the lemons and wash them thoroughly. I got out a new scrubby pad just for this!

Zest the lemons. You can use a potato peeler, but its harder to use, plus you have to be extra careful not to get any of the white part of the lemon into the mix. (narsty) You might as well just go spend 5 bucks on a zester.

This is tedious. I recommend putting on a movie, and then not standing too close to anything, because you will get lemon spatter pretty much everywhere. Or maybe I’m just not a very graceful zester. Also, I zested some of the palms of my hands. Just a flesh wound. (Don't worry, no flesh or blood got into the mix!)
I did kind of feel like I was zesting my brains out after a while. Did I mention it was tedious?

So, this part of the recipe is very simple. Mix the lemon zest with the everclear. If you want to keep all of your liquid, mix it in another, slightly larger glass container. (It is best to use a glass container due to the high alcohol and acidity content of this recipe) I didn’t have a slightly larger glass container, so I just mixed the zest straight into the bottle. Unfortunately, I had to pour out just a little bit of the alcohol to get it all to fit. That's fine.

That’s all. This mixture has to sit for 7 days, and swirl it each day. (but how perfect is that for step two to be next week’s Tasty Tuesday!)

But in the meantime, you have all these sad naked lemons sitting there. 

What do you do when life hands you sad, naked lemons? 

Make lemonade. (happy, clothed lemonade, I suppose?)

Can I just take a moment to say that if you don't own a lemon squeezer like the one above, you are a crazy person.. It's super cheap, and its wayy, way better than any other manual-juicers out there. If I had a fancy electronic spinny juicer, I'd use that, but I'm poor, and this was super easy. Plus a great arm workout, but not the killing kind. (and my faithful readers know how much I prefer unintentional exercise to the intentional kind)

Homemade Lemonade is pretty simple. I had enough lemons to make two cups of lemon juice, so I looked up sugarwaterlemon ratios on the google, and I had the perfect amount to make a whole big pitcher of some yummy, yummy homemade lemonade. (I even had an extra lemon to slice and float for decoration! Fancy.)

-2 cups lemon juice
-2 cups sugar dissolved into two cups of warm water (on the stove at a low temp, to make a simple syrup)
-About 6 cups plain cold water.

Mix, chill, serve, etc. Yum. Have friends over. Best if you have a porch, unfortunately I have no porch, and it's 10 degrees outside. Oh well. We can pretend.

Oh, before we go, let's check on our bottle of everclearlemonness:

This has been Tasty Tuesday! Thanks for joining us, I’m Rebecca Hannigan, the Floating Violinist! Stay tuned for the second half of Limoncello, and in the meantime, make good use of life’s sad naked lemons! Stay classy!