My Little Chef's Corner: When Life Gives you Limes...

If I make "lemonade" with limes, is it still called Lemonade? Or is it Limenade?

We had way too many limes and Sydney wanted to squeeze them ALL, so what better thing to make than a nice refreshing pitcher of Limenade.


The Prep

In the Little Chef's Kitchen it couldn't be just plain old limenade though, we needed a twist and decided to add a superfood, chia seeds. We'd made this before following a very simple recipe by Marcella Valladolid from her book Mexican Made Easy. I think she used lemons in her recipe though.

We used a couple of tablespoons of chia seeds and soaked them in water for about 30 minutes to get them in their slimy consistency, I know that may sound a bit gross but trust me, that's how you want them.

While we waited for the chia seeds Sydney began squeezing the limes. We have this little contraption in our kitchen that helps in squeezing limes, most people have one of these, they work great UNLESS you have tiny little hands like Syd's... may I say I had to step into the squeezing because her thumb couldn't reach the top handle, but it was really entertaining to see her really trying though.

We ended up with quite a bit of juice out of those limes so we had to make sure we added enough water and sugar to contrast the sourness of the lime.

The stirring was needless to say the most fun part for Sydney (other than drinking it of course) since we had added a lot of ice, when she stirred, it made this wonderful noise against the glass pitcher. The sound actually took me back to when I was kid growing up in Costa Rica and my mom would make a "refresco" every day for lunch time. A refresco is what is known in Mexico as "Agua Fresca." My mom would take whatever tropical fruits were in season at the time, blend or squeeze, add ice, water and sugar and voila! I really didn't know artificially flavored drinks existed (such as soda) until I was much older.
Now it was time to add our soaked chia seeds after draining most of the water out.