Zero-Wasting My Life #4 – I Make My Own Lemon Drink

Plastic-free organic lemon squash – the secret

My issue today is what to do about the plastic bottle our squash comes in. When the kids were young we used to make our own lemon squash from our lemon tree. Sadly we no longer live in NZ and we don’t have a lemon tree. Sue says I killed it, but I maintain to this day I only gave it a severe pruning. It must have died of some disease.

It’s one of those conflicts I don’t think will ever be resolved.

I don’t have the recipe any more but I do remember it needed a whole cup of sugar to make it. We also had to juice the lemons. There wasn’t much more to it than that, at least that’s how it appeared from my vantage point as an observer.

I managed to find – who am I kidding? – I easily found – several recipes for home-made squash through that search monopolist Google. Something perverse in me made me pick out the one in the Washington Post. Even though I know the USA is famed for many things, delicate cuisine not being among them.

But in the end I didn’t even need that. The basic recipe is so simple:

Plastic-free organic lemon squash recipe

1. Juice up some lemons (150ml / 1/4 pint)
2. Add a load of water (1 litre / 1 3/4 pints)
3. Add way too much sugar (4 tbsp)
4. Mix it all up

Gets rid of most of your lemons, uses no plastic whatever. However, I have no lemons at all so I had to buy some.

But what to do with our apples?

We don’t have our own lemons any more. What we do have is apples. We started off with two buckets of them, but after I removed those eaten by bugs we were down to one. One bucket, not one apple, but I guess you knew that. Still, it’s a start.

There are loads of things you can do with apples: apple sauce, apple jelly, baked apples, apple strudel. I don’t like any of these but I do like stuffing my face with chips, so I am going to have a go at baking some apple slices. All this is going to start tomorrow.