Recipe: Sparkling Ginger Mint Limeade

It always seems like a good idea to add a mint plant to your basket when you’re at the nursery. However, its fast growing nature eventually makes that spontaneous decision seem poor. Wanting to do more than to garnish every meal, I went on a search for recipes that didn’t include mint jam and could help provide relief for the early summer heat we’d been experiencing in the Northwest.

I came across a Fresh Mint and Ginger Lemonade recipe on Epicurious and it sounded wonderful but I still had to read through the comments. It seems that no matter how many stars a recipe found online has, few recipes are ever as great as touted. So, it’s nice to discover suggestions from the “cooks on the front line” and incorporate what sounds best. In this case, using sparkling water instead of still sounded like a great idea, especially as it allowed me to take advantage of my beloved SodaStream machine. Then my fiancé chose limes over lemons as the featured citrus.

While delicious, it seemed like a lot of work for such a little production (4 cups). The good news is that it gets easier and goes faster each time you do it.