Strawberry Honey Soda
I swear I’m not trying to slack off with recipes here. Real life is simply taking over.
Call it busy summer days with longer lasting daylight. Call it the-garden-is-taking-over-our-lives-again. Call it traveling too much. Call it, more often than not, laziness once I finally sit down at night. Mostly, it’s dreading turning the computer on after a long day at work spent – you guessed it – on the computer.
There are some days, weeks even, when making the simplest thing is hard for me. And this really doesn’t do well for the blog, if you couldn’t tell. I feel weird about sharing this, like I’m the only one that feels this way or goes through this and that’s always the worst feeling. That no one else feels the same or understands, but I don’t think that’s true.
Like most of you (or so I hope), I lose steam…motivation…creativity. Every few months, I find myself in a rut and sometimes, it’s hard to dig myself out of it. I get comfortable where I am and have no desire to change things, to make new things, to do anything that requires thought again. This is when I fall back into books, reading for hours, and not wanting to do anything else. Between work, commuting, making meals, pulling lettuce and chard, making jam, freezing berries, doing laundry, cleaning house, taking care of pets and reading, I just don’t want to do anything else.
So it’s been easy things here lately.
Quick meals, lots of leftovers, nothing that requires too much work. I know I’ll get back to the point where I want to spend an entire day making croissants or roasting a chicken while making bread and braising something else. But that day is not today.
I started to feel bad about this, about not making lots of things lately or not having much in the way of motivation to cook. But we all go through this, right? It can’t just be me.
Sometimes, you just need a break.
Even though our big batches of strawberries are done for the year, I’m holding onto one bowlful in the fridge, willing them to last until our raspberries are ripe.
We’ve made pie and jam and frozen them for pancake sauce this winter. The rest that we have will be eaten on their own or used in simple recipes like this, leaving us with good memories until next spring when we have fresh strawberries again.
The best part about this homemade soda is it’s only 3 ingredients and most of the time you need to make it is hands-off. You know exactly what’s in your soda and can make it how you like it.
If you want just a touch of strawberry flavor, go light on the base and heavy on the soda. Throw some of the base into smoothies or stir in yogurt or ice cream – it’s a good thing to have in the fridge, whether you’re going to use it for soda or not.
Strawberry Honey Soda
Ingredients:
- 2 cups strawberries, hulled and halved
- 1 Tbsp honey
- club soda, for serving
Directions:
- Place the strawberries in a medium bowl and toss with the honey. Cover the bowl with a lid or foil and let them sit at room temperature for a couple of hours until the berries have started soften and given up some juice.
- Pour the berries and the syrup that has released in the bottom of the bowl into your blender or food processor. Blend the berries until the mixture is smooth. (At this point, you can strain the mixture to remove any seeds that didn’t get pureed or you can leave them in; I’m lazy and didn’t feel like straining it, but I don’t mind some seeds in my drinks.)
- To make 1 soda, put 1 tablespoon of the strawberry honey base in the bottom of a glass. Slowly add at least a cup of club soda (or more), stirring to combine. Add ice and serve.