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Old June 3rd 18, 03:08 AM posted to rec.bicycles.misc
Joy Beeson
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Posts: 1,638
Default AG: Beverage


I planned an all-day ride for Thursday, and the weather was predicted
to be scorching, so on Wednesday night I stick-blended much too small
a piece of fresh ginger in a pint or two of water, then simmered the
ginger for an hour with chopped rhubarb and a quarter cup of rice.
I strained it into a jar, ate the seasoned rice for my bedtime snack
(with butter and cinnamon fructose), and chilled the extract
overnight.

The switchel lacked half a cup of being enough to fill a bottle, so I
poured in some orange-colored juice. Oops, that wasn't orange juice,
it was pink-grapefruit juice! And it was canned juice with every
molecule of the bitter in the peel included -- they must run the
fruits through a blender, then centrifuge out the solids.

(Bout of nostalgia for my Florida childhood, when we squeezed citrus
juice into quart-size glasses for every meal.) (But I don't think
they were ever more than half-full.)

So I put a spoonful of fructose in it, and it was just right -- but
benefitted from being topped off with water at every fountain.


Today, I was only going to two Farmers' Markets and a group yard sale,
and the predicted high was only seventy-nine Fahrenheit, so I didn't
make switchel, but I had found a couple of flowering stalks on the
rhubarb and made a tea of the stems, so I poured what was left of the
infusion into a bottle, added a sprig of basil, and filled the bottle
with ice cubes. Oops, this would taste much better with a little
honey, but I've already put the ice in; honey would never dissolve.

Fructose doesn't taste as good as honey, but it's finely-divided, and
it's nutritionally exactly the same. I measured it in with the same
plastic spoon I measured fructose into the switchel with.

And it was WAY too much sugar.

So I topped it off at every fountain, and shook it vigorously in the
hope of bruising the basil. Next time I'll bruise the basil before I
put it into the bottle.



One of these years I'll make a batch of switchel with molasses and
vinegar.

--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/


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