Sunshine in a Bottle

 My sister works for Driscoll's berries, so we always have an abundance of berries around the house.  We also have a huge lemon tree in the back yard.  I will never get over how many people in California have citrus trees in their yards.  Lemons and other citrus are so expensive elsewhere.  I am trying to take advantage of the abundance of both lemons and berries, and found a recipe for canned concentrate.  The recipe can be found here: http://www.freshpreserving.com/recipe.aspx?r=245.  My mom has a juicer, which made everything sooo much easier!  I scraped everything out of the lemon peel and set the peel aside.  I could put the entire lemon in the juicer (I did try to remove the pith with the peel).  I used 5 lbs of lemons, and 2 cartons of strawberries.  Each batch (I made 2) made 12 half pint jars.  The recipe says to add equal parts water to the concentrate when you are ready to use it.  I found that mine is super strong, so I add two parts water to one part concentrate.  The recipe says you could also add seltzer, but that would be more expensive and it is perfectly good without anything bubbly!

 A half pint jar of concentrate would make more than enough for 2 people to enjoy with a meal.  You could even add more water and stretch it further.   This was super easy to make, and cheap as well (if you live in California at least).  Lemons, if you buy them in the store, are $5 for a 5lb bag.  And strawberry cartons were 2 for $5.  So $10 to make 12 jars of concentrate.  Each jar could get 6 servings (at least, without stretching it too far).  So $10 for 72 servings comes out to 14 cents per serving.  Who wouldn't pay 14 cents for some bottled sunshine?  That is definitely in my budget!

I am looking forward to enjoying these throughout the year!