Lovage Spritzers

We got the idea for these spritzers after a dinner at Monsoon. One of the salads featured candied lovage - and given how much lovage we have in our garden, we were curious what they were doing with it. We didn't order the salad that night - too much geoduck sashimi already - but I asked the waiter if he could snatch me a little taste so I could figure out what it was. He brought back a tiny bowl of lovage stems that had been soaked in simple syrup.

Our use of lovage has been limited to the leaves in things like stocks and roasted chickens - neither of us had ever thought to use the stems. We went home and made a simple syrup and soaked the stems in the syrup for about an hour (off the heat) and then added the syrup to a little sparkling water. It was cool and refreshing, and a nice change from Doc Brown's Cel-Ray soda!