Peach Blueberry Lemonade
Photo: Carolina Ayala / Contributor
With cold weather in the rearview and balmy summers to look forward to, the edible joys of spring are all around us. From sugar snap peas to fennel to about a dozen varieties of greens, the farmer’s table stands at Urban Harvest farmer’s market are bursting with beautiful produce. Last weekend, I had my first local peach and blueberry sighting of the year. Lightsey Farms had arrived with their first spring harvest of local plums and peaches and there was another farmer with boxes and boxes of local wild blueberries. I brought them home and turned them into a lightly spiced lemonade of sorts. Growing up in a time and place when local was the only way we ate and drank, I remember my mother buying baskets of plums or apricots during peak summer season and making a variety of sweetened concentrated syrups, called sherbat. She’d puree the fruit at its ripest, sometimes cook it down or other times just strain and combine with sugar and other seasonings and store them in tall bottles. We would add water or club soda to turn them into drinks all year long. My parents would have adult versions with generous splashes of gin or vodka. Here is a gently spiced lemonade to welcome a Texas spring, it’s only lightly sweetened, adjust and spike as needed.