Easy homemade strawberry lemonade using freeze-dried strawberries

I recently bought a #10 can of freeze-dried strawberry slices in the emergency preparedness aisle at Wal-Mart. I meant to use it as baby snacks, figuring the Mountain House type stuff would be cheaper than the Gerber freeze-dried strawberries in the baby food aisle. But Mae-Mae didn't like the new stuff because it was a bit too tangy for her. So I was left with about 9 cups of freeze-dried strawberries sitting in my pantry for the last few months.

Now it is the time of year when we always have lemonade in our fridge.  So on a whim, I grabbed a few handfuls of the strawberries and tossed them into a 2-quart pitcher of lemonade.  The result was a delicious strawberry lemonade that could easily pass for a restaurant recipe, but I know my strawberries weren't sitting in a tub of sugary syrup.

Super-easy version: add 3 generous handfuls of freeze-dried strawberries to a half gallon of store-bought lemonade.

Slightly less easy: Make the lemonade yourself, using the recipe below.

6.5 cups water
1 cup lemon juice (bottled)
1 cup sugar
3 generous handfuls of freeze-dried strawberries

Slightly less easy than that:  When we do it, we take 1 cup of water and boil it first, then add the 1 cup sugar, to make a simple syrup.  Then add the remaining ingredients as usual.

Really trying to impress people: Squeeze the lemon juice yourself from fresh lemons.