Longest Day Celebration

I love the longest day of the year! We celebrated with our traditional stay-outside-till-it-gets-dark party. We had rosemary lemonade and I made tiny loaves of bread, and then we made little open-face sandwiches with various spreads. Everything was good!

I really liked this carrot-cheese curry spread---it sounds weird, but it was so good! Yum. I left out the mincemeat, not being one who keeps canned mincemeat on hand (?!).

We made homemade ricotta, which is heavenly. And here is the recipe for the rosemary lemonade. It's so easy, but tastes so fancy---just different enough from plain lemonade! When I was newly married, I demonstrated how to make this herbed lemonade for a Relief Society activity one time, and everyone was so nice about it. It's one of the first times I felt like I was "one of the ladies" instead of just tagging along. :)

 Herbed Lemonade

Syrup:

1/2 C. sugar

1 C. water

4-5 sprigs of mint, rosemary, basil, or other herb

Combine water and sugar in small saucepan. Add sprigs of herbs. Stir over medium-high heat until mixture comes to a boil. Boil 1-2 minutes. Remove from heat and let steep for 2-3 minutes (for rosemary, 20 minutes)—or as desired. Remove and discard herb sprigs. Cool syrup before adding to lemonade. 

Lemonade:

4 c. water

3 c. lemon juice (about 16 lemons)

1 1/2 to 2 c. sugar, or to taste

Herb syrup, above

Combine water, lemon juice, and sugar. Stir until sugar dissolves. Add mint or rosemary syrup to flavor as desired (I use about 1/2 of the syrup for 2 quarts of lemonade). Garnish with mint or other herb leaves. Makes 2 quarts.

Nutmeg came out to enjoy the day with us too. He feasted on fresh mint and oregano from the garden.

Seb did a lovely job with the flower arranging

Goldie looked like this (concerned/mad) every time she ran out of milk in her cup, which was often.

Maybe the best part of the evening was having these Izze floats. Have you ever tried Izze in floats? It was an amazing discovery for us. Blackberry was probably my favorite, but the clementine and, surprisingly, the apple, were SO good too! I've had floats with orange and various other sodas before, but they are usually too sweet for my taste. The slightly-sour Izze worked perfectly when sweetened by the ice cream, I thought. And it looked so pretty! :)