Homemade Italian Ice

I was watching the Food TV network this weekend and Cooking for Real with Sunny Anderson came on and part of her meal was making homemade Italian Ice.  I never really thought about making it from scratch, but you need only a few things:  water, sugar and lemon juice!  That’s it!  Basically, you make a simple sugar on the stove.      

•  Pour 3 cups water in a pan
• Add 1 1/2 cups sugar* (I would use less next time, maybe 3/4 cup, it was really sweet)!
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1/4 cup lime juice

Stir the water and sugar mixture on the stove on a low heat until all the sugar is dissolved.  I did that for about 5 minutes.  Pour in the lemon/lime juice, or whatever other juice flavors you like.  Pour that into 9 x 13 glass baking dish and put it in the freezer for a few hours.  After a few hours, take it out and with two forks, just start scraping the top layer.  Put in back in the freezer and repeat this process, except check it each hour.  Just scrape with a fork, serve it in a dish and that’s it!  It makes 8 servings, each serving is 145 calories.  The only thing I would do differently next time is use less sugar, we all thought it was a little too sweet. If you serve some the next day, take it out of the freezer and let it defrost for about 10 minutes, so you can scape some more out.  It will look like a big hunk of ice when you take it out, but after a few minutes, it will soften and you will be good to go!