Stick a fork in me.  I am done.  I am so tired I can hardly see straight – but it has been too long since my last post, and I have a lot of good stuff piling up.  I haven’t been doing as much cooking and baking lately – although it did finally cool down in our part of the world.  Today we had our first real day of rain in over a month.  It was actually satisfying to me, as I hunkered down in my office to try and get through my piles of work.  It doesn’t help that I was so excited for the kids to be done with school, thinking that my life outside of work would relax a little, but then swim team squeezed it’s way into our lives, and our evenings have been even busier.  I keep thinking that things will change, but what I have realized is that this is the new normal.  I liked the old normal…

The other weekend I was at the farmer’s market, and they had the most beautiful looking rhubarb.  I am not a huge rhubarb fan, except for this.  Last year when I made my annual batch, I just couldn’t get the temperature high enough, and I finally ended up canning the jelly before it was completely ready.  I just lost patience.  The jelly still tasted delicious, but it was a little more syrupy than I would have liked.  I decided to try making a drink for the girls out of it – I mixed some of that very soft jelly with some club soda, and it tasted delicious.  The only problem was that there was still pectin in that jelly, which made the drink just slightly thick.  I knew there had to be a better way – and I realized if I just left the pectin out, that basically I would be making a rhubarb simple syrup.

Well, that’s exactly what I did – and what a treat.  It was the perfect remedy for a hot day.  I poured some of that simple syrup over ice, then topped it off with some club soda (or sparking water), and you have a rhubarb flavored sparkling drink that would make anyone feel like they were on vacation.  At this point, I will take what I can get…

Ingredients

• 4 cups
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup sugar

Preparation

Combine the rhubarb, sugar, and water in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer and cook gently, stirring occasionally, until the fruit is soft and the liquid has thickened slightly, about 20 minutes.

Set a fine-meshed strainer (or a coarse strainer lined with cheesecloth)over a large bowl. Pour the rhubarb through the strainer until most of the liquid is in the bowl. Press the solids a little with the back of a spoon to extract more syrup.

Carefully pour the syrup into a clean bottle, cover or cork the bottle and refrigerate. It should keep for quite some time in the fridge.

For a printer-friendly version of this recipe, please click here:  Rhubarb Simple Syrup