100 Things #27: Making Interesting Drinks.

I love cooking things. I also love coming up with nice drinks to go with them. Often that’s a customized tea blend. Other times, it’s a homemade soda. Sometimes it’s a juice thing.

And sometimes it’s some unholy hybrid of the three.

And sometimes, it’s entirely undefinable.

I remember a good drink that began with seltzer fizzed-up three buzzes in my SodaStream unit. After having drunk half the liter as plain seltzer, made some lemon syrup using sugar and lemon juice, added a shot of tart Montmorency cherry juice, and then tossed that all in a tall glass. The combination was wonderfully sweet and tart, and the dark color belied the taste that I’d just made—because it tasted like pink lemonade.

A slightly less…successful attempt started with the same strength of seltzer, but with a bit of vanilla syrup instead—Torani, if I recall correctly. I’d forgotten that such a heavy syrup, being added to a seltzer’d bottle—even tilted properly—results n a vanilla geyser. Furthermore, even though the liquid was bubbly as hell, the flavor was flat. Missing that certain something or another. I still haven’t figured out how to get that one to work. A shame, considering vanilla’s my favorite flavor.

Up Next in The Daily Grind: PUSHING IT.

 

 

What you are currently looking at is the lifeline for people living in the projects—specifically, those poor bastards stuck in minimum wage jobs.

 

I’m one of those unlucky bastards. (And, hey, as long as we’re on the term, it’s actually true in my case—If I was a part of Westeros’s social classes, I’d have a bastard surname. And since the Starks are the family I’m behind in my admittedly way-behind reading list, just call me Snow.) So when I got into the building today and saw a table loaded down with canned goods and sundries, I partook in that most holy of generous food-kitchen rules:

If you need it, then take it. That’s why it’s there.

As a result, there is much more food in the “oh crap things are getting bad here” stash in the pantry. If this comes up each week as it usually does, I can probably stock up to the point where I’ll be safe even when I run out of month at the end of the money.

But there are projects that need to be started, work that has to be done, and savings that have to be done to get a certain plan off of the ground and into the proper phase of development.

At some point I will be figuring out how to use Paypal for things like donations and contributions. For one, I find myself needing the use of a good nutritional analysis program so that I can provide the nutritional data—even if it is only the base data—for the recipes that I have developed. The cheapest alternative is still more than I’m willing to spend in the winter months, and all that is left at the end of the month goes into a place where I’m not allowed to get at it until I actually have made enough to get everything done. I’m still working on the projects and experiments, but it is mightily inefficient to have to go onto the internet every time I need to analyze a recipe for the project. …also there is the very real threat of someone finding one of my creations, ganking it, and plagarizing it—and worse, possibly  making MONEY off of something that isn’t their creation.

Normally I’m kind of lax where it comes to the enforcement of copyright enforcement—it’s hard to do and expensive to boot, so it is often impractical for the guy who has less money to do anything about it.

And in this case, I’m the guy with less money.

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I wonder how many people would enjoy a little taste of Quinn’s work in the kitchen. Even if the only buyers are from LJ, I’d put out a collection or two if it was in demand enough by the time I got enough recipes to fill a tradebook.