You make lemonade! Right? Ok, but how?

Ok, this is the 21st Century, now we use mixes. That makes it even easier, right?

But, I’ve given this some thought, and like many procedures there’s not necessarily a right way to do it. That said, I may change the procedure I use.

Ok, so I use one of those little pouches that make a lemon-flavored drink. I’m hesitant to call it actual lemonade, but let’s go with it.

Typically my process is to take the container, fill a drinking glass and if the container is empty, or has only a little bit left in it, make more. (Obviously if there’s a lot left, I just put the container back in the refrigerator. 🙂

So still pretty simple, right? Or is it.

Basically you put the powder in the container and then add water.

Or do you put the water in and then add the powder?

You may ask, “What difference does it make?”

Ultimately, it shouldn’t, in either case you end up with a lemon-flavored drink as your final product.

All along I’ve been going the route of putting the powder in first then adding the water. There was a rational reason for this: the turbulence of the water entering the container would help mix it and it would require less shaking. I thought this was pretty clever.

But then one night as I was filling the container with water (it was sitting in the sink) I got distracted and by the time I returned my attention to it, I had overfilled the container and water was flowing over the top.  Or rather, somewhat diluted lemon-flavored was flowing over the top.  I had no idea how long this had been going on, but I knew I had an over-filled container that had to have a bit more liquid poured off before I could put it away. It also meant the lemon-flavored drink was going to be diluted by an unknown amount. That is less than optimal.

So the simple solution I figured was to change my procedure. Add the water first and then add the flavoring. That way if there was too much water in the container, I could just pour off the extra and then add the proper amount of powder and have an undiluted lemon-flavored drink.

That worked fine until one day as I was pouring the package, it slipped through my fingers into a half-filled container.  Now I had to find a way to fish it out. Ironically, the easiest way to do it was to overfill it so the package would float to the top. Of course now I was back to diluted lemon-flavored drink. And who knows what was on the outside of the powder package that was now inside the water.

Each procedure has its failure modes. Both, when successful, get me to the final solution.

So, which one is better?

I put in the powder first and then put in the water. I could say I have a rational reason like preferring slightly diluted lemon-flavored drink over a possibly contaminated lemon-flavored drink from a dropped in packet.

But the truth is, it really doesn’t matter which order I do the steps in. Neither failure is completely fatal and in fact about equivalent in their seriousness.

Old habits die hard, so I stick with my original method.

But, the point is that even in a process as simple as making lemon-flavored drink, there’s more than one way to do it, and either way may be workable. Just make sure you can justify your reasoning.