Whether you’re outside grilling for a party, working in the garden, or floating in your swimming pool, you know just how easy it is to work up a thirst.
Below are 18 wonderful fruit drink recipes that will help you slay the thirst dragon and stay deliciously hydrated (13 non-alcoholic fruit drink recipes followed by 5 that contain alcohol).
If you’ve ever had it, you know that beer battered food can be one of the greatest things to come out of a kitchen.
If you’re fortunate enough to have some extra Guinness Beer sitting around after St. Patrick’s Day, this week’s delicious recipe for Guinness Beer Battered Cod from the folks at (the luckily not-so-aptly-named) Culinary Disasters Food Blog may be just the recipe you’re looking for.
Fry up some homemade French fries, and you’ll have the makings of a truly satisfying fish and chips meal.
2 lbs of cod cut into large sections
1.5 cups all-purpose flour plus about 1/2 cup for dredging the fish
1 bottle of Guinness Draught
1/2 cup of whole milk
1 egg yolk
1 TB of kosher salt and black pepper
1/2 gallon of canola or peanut oil
Okay, getting older is, generally speaking, kind of a drag. However, getting older does offer the occasional perk, such as being able to say “Well, back in the day…” with more authority and gravitas than, say, a twelve-year old.
This comes in especially handy when talking about gadgets. For instance, this SodaStream device. Freshly made soda on demand? In your house? In less time than it takes to nuke a burrito?
Ahem…
Well, back in the day, we didn’t have such luxuries. We kids would press our grimy faces up against the windows of the soda shoppe (that’s how long ago we’re talking about here: ‘shop’ was still written in Ye Olde English), wishing we could have one of those cool pull-down fizzy water spigots and all those flavored syrups (back then we didn’t have cola and such; we had flavors like horehound and rhubarb and gooseberry. They tasted like compost but they were all we had, so we drank ‘em, dammit!).
Sure, we tried to make soda at home by blowing bubbles through a straw into our rhubarb water until we were blue-lipped and bug-eyed, but it was just no good. The bubbles – like our young hopes – just evaporated (*insert wistful sigh here*)
Fast forward an undisclosed number of decades: the nice folks at SodaStream want me to check out this new, in-home soda making device. Hmmmm…let me think about that for 1.8 nanoseconds…mmmm, okay sure!
So they sent me this neat-o countertop thingy that has a footprint the size of, well, a footprint. They sent me a bunch of flavors, too. And guess what? No rhubarb! Yay!
Putting it together is ridiculously easy: you screw the narrow CO2 canister (or ‘carbonator’ in soda-speak) into the top part of the unit, slide it into the bottom part, and turn it until it clicks. It goes together so quickly, someone could shoot you with a tranquilizer dart and you’d still have this thing put together before you fell face down into the dust with your tongue sticking out.
Making soda is just as easy. You fill the special, heavy-duty plastic bottle with water up to the fill line, attach it to the spigot, pull the lever a few times, and – presto change-o – you have sparkling water. Then you add a cap of flavoring to it and you’ve got soda pop.
But that’s where the coolness begins. You can mix your own flavors (always wanted to try cream soda ginger ale? Go for it!) or add fruit juices (Pomegranate? Kiwi? Mango? Key lime? Yum? Yes!) or chocolate syrup, or whatever your effervescent imagination suggests.
Here’s another cool app: Let’s say you’re having a party and run out of mixers. No problem! Just whip up a batch of lemon-lime or ginger ale or cola right on the spot. As party tricks go, it may not be as cool as turning big honkin’ jugs of water into wine, but it’s as close as most of us non-deities will probably ever get.
So, yeah, I like this idea a lot. It’s fun and convenient as all get out. Plus, you don’t have to schlep heavy bottles or cans from store to car to home (hey, the heavy part is the water – and you already have that at home!) Plus, it saves on packaging, reduces waste, saves the energy used to ship the bottles or cans to the store, etc, etc. Even the CO2 canisters are recyclable (you send them back empty and they send you a full one.)
It’s also, admittedly, a childhood fantasy come true. Ah, if only those grubby-fingered urchins from the olde soda shoppe could see me with my shiny new SodaStream, making customized sodas whenever I want.
“Bwaaahaaahaaaahaaaa!” I’d laugh, jealously clutching my new toy. “How you like me now, urchins?”
Below is a video which shows how easy the SodaStream Soda Maker is to use as well as the fun drinks you can make with it.
Enjoy!
Please join us tomorrow to read our newest daily food and cooking article on HuggingtheCoast.Com: Guinness Beer Battered Cod Recipe.
Author of the 
Please join us tomorrow to read our newest daily food and cooking article on HuggingtheCoast.Com: a recipe for Red Pepper Hummus in Festive Cucumber Cups.
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