By Donna V. Scaglione
There’s nothing like that first sip of a chilled drink on a summer day. The glass is cool against your hands. The ice clinks as you sip. And the taste — tart limes, sweet raspberry juice, maybe a mint leaf. Whatever you like in your drink you can have great taste without a lot of added sugar and calories. Plus, you can select fresh ingredients like watermelon, blackberries, and citrus fruits for easy recipes that have antioxidants, fiber and other nutrients, as well as intense flavors. Here are five recipes to enjoy.
1. Watermelon Lemonade
Sure, a glass of cool lemonade sounds wonderful on a hot summer afternoon. But too many recipes call for lots of added sugar, which means extra calories. But that’s not the case for the Watermelon Lemonade recipe that Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian in Chicago and author of The Flexitarian Diet, offers. It calls for four cups of seedless watermelon puréed with the juice of three lemons. Serve it over ice.
One cup of this sweet concoction contains only 50 calories, half of the amount in traditional pink lemonade, she tells USA Today. "It has 45 percent of the daily requirement of vitamin C and contains no added sugar versus the more than six teaspoons of sugar per glass in traditional lemonade."
