Lemons & Scrapes

James and I decided that we would start a new tradition.. making limoncello for the holidays. If you haven't heard of it, check out limoncello quest. Basically it's a really sweet Italian liquor that you make with lemon zest and everclear. You let the zest sit in the everclear for a while (like weeks) and it will take on the taste of the lemon. Then you add simple syrup, let it sit a while longer, and then filter it. It's amazing. And you need a lot of lemons for it.. last time I made the mistake of zesting all the lemons at once.

Seriously, that's a lot of lemons. Anyway, after you zest them, there is nothing to hold the moisture in and they go bad really fast. So.. since the zest is supposed to sit in the everclear for a while anyway, I decided to just zest them as I used them. And they do make a pretty centerpiece until I use them all. So far, I've made strawberry lemonade. Don't be jealous of how good this looks. 

Okay.. you can be a little jealous. It was delicious. Also, with the abundance of raspberries out here (one of the best parts of living in Washington), we decided to make a Raspberrycello as well (raspcello? raspbercello?). So we split up the everclear and we've got raspberries in half, lemon zest in the other.

I hope it works, because otherwise it will be a waste of perfectly good raspberries. 

It was actually not good timing to decide to do a bunch of stuff with lemons, because James convinced me to go on a crazy long bike ride yesterday. I haven't been biking as much since we moved to Washington, and even when I was, riding over 20 miles is still kinda long for me... and that's when the roads are flat flatness like in Illinois. So anyway, long story short, we went on what I'm gonna call the hardest bike ride I've ever done to date. It ended up being about 22 miles, but holy cow is it hilly here. We also got lost at one point.. went to turn around in gravel and I got stuck in my clips and fell over for only the second time ever. And we were only 6 miles in. 

And yes there was blood. Not a lot.. I know. It actually just shook me up more that anything and knocked the wind out of me. I had to fight back the urge to cry. I might have a little bit if I had been by myself, but I feel like I can't be a little girl in front of my Airborne Ranger hubby, so I dusted off my scraped up hands and we powered on. (He actually was very sweet about making sure I was okay before we went on). And, thankfully with I think more downhill than uphill on the way home, we made it back before dark. 

But anyway.. the scraped up hands do not mix well with working with lemons. And I still have like 8 more to zest and figure out what to do with. Dangit.

Anyone else have a biking or running wipe-out story? 

PS: still haven't heard any news on whether the deployment has been postponed or not. So we're still in limbo. I think God is trying to teach me patience.