Spring has felt like a strange indecision between warm and cold weather this year. It started with an early maple-production window and quickly followed up with a bitter season after the abnormal warm temperatures failed to accommodate sweet snaps as the sap ran. 

But those paying attention to the weather were able to make the best of the short and early year before the sap ran out. We get what we’re given sometimes, be it a long growing season or a rainy year, or sometimes just a bag of extra lemons. 

That’s right. As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. For my wife, this came as the result of having a few extra lemons for her tea. By a few, I of course mean she accidentally bought a bag when she already had one.

So what do you do with extra lemons? We really do make lemonade. Not only that, but she zests the lemons before juicing them and freezes the zest in small ice cubes for her tea and other recipes. The juice typically would be mixed with sugar and water for your run-of-the-mill lemonade recipe. Fortunately I have one of those wives who knows how to play with her food and comes up with great ideas for us to try.

Ultimately she wanted us to eat less sugar than we would have if she made it according to societal norms. The alternative was a sugar direct from nature. We could use apple juice, but that would sort of change the juice. Honey is a great natural source of sugar as are berries, but neither caught her attention quite so much as the maple syrup we have burning a hole in the pantry shelf. 

This is syrup from two seasons ago that we’re still working our way through. If you didn’t know, four gallons of syrup for a single family is plenty. Now we know. But it affords us the option to play with it a little bit and see what sort of new things we can make with it. Lemonade just so happened to be the star this week. 

After she mixed it up in a large pitcher, we tried it and agreed it was a little heavy on the maple syrup and not quite sour enough to capture the lemon flavor. However, after letting it sit in the fridge overnight, it turned out it was a fantastic treat after all, and we only adjusted the portions on the ingredients slightly. 

If you happen to try it yourself, feel free to add or subtract lemon juice and syrup according to what you prefer in sweetness and sourness. This just happens to be what we like and our kids like as well. 

The way out here when life gives you maple trees, you use that stuff for all kinds of sugary concoctions and the lemons are just a bonus.