Tag Archives: lemonade

Watermelon Lemonade, Bean + Barley Salad, and Insomia (AGH!)

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Last night I slept a whopping THREE HOURS! Ugh. I hate when I can’t sleep. I used to have insomnia a lot – monkey brain would spin and I wouldn’t be able to turn it off! That rarely happens now though. I think I just slept too much over the weekend (naps!) and so last night I was tired, but wide awake. So I played lots of Wordtwist and now have a new personal best of 222! Top that! :)

Even on just a measly three hours, I still managed to walk the girls this morning and run 7 miles! I’m a big believer in trying to stick to a regular schedule so even though my sleep was @#$%ed messed up, I went through the rest of my day as if it hadn’t been.

Anywho, over the weekend I made a couple of recipes that I thought I’d share with you.

First, how better to get into the July 4 spirit than with Watermelon Lemonade! Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups watermelon juice
  • 1 cup fresh lemon juice
  • 3 cups water
  • 3/4 cup simple syrup
  • several sprigs of fresh mint

Just add everything together and stir! Yum!

To get the watermelon juice, I just cut up chunks of watermelon and pureed them in my Vitamix until completely liquid. Then I strained the puree through a fine wire mesh strainer.

The simple syrup is just one cup of sugar added to one cup of water – bring to boil until sugar dissolves and then allow to cool before adding to the other ingredients.

Doesn’t it look festive and very 4th of July-ish?

DSC_0219DSC_0222

The second recipe I wanted to share with you is a salad recipe by my friend Kristen. It’s called Two Bean and Barley Salad and it was really fabulous. I brought this to a July 4 pool party and everyone really liked it.

DSC_0225I loved using barley! I very rarely cook with barley so it was fun to get to use it in this recipe. The salad was very garlicky -  I used fresh picked garlic from the farmer’s market and it might have been a little on the strong side. I think next time I will decrease the garlic and try to bring out the tahini flavor some more. Maybe some miso? I don’t know – I’ll let you know if /when I play around with it some more. THANK YOU TO KRISTEN for creating this masterpiece! Check out Kristen’s blog – she has some great original recipes on there!

Ok that’s it for now. I’m going straight to bed and look forward to a really great night of SLEEP!

I’m wondering, what do you do when you can’t sleep?