Gnurple dot Net

Allow me to introduce you to a fridge door:

Citric Sugar Endeavours

Please meet my very sweet friends: lemon and grapefruit-lime on top; and orange-lemon in the curvy bottle below. Ignore the box, that’s just some udder juice milking the photographic moment for all its worth.

I apologize for the poor photo quality. Sometimes the best camera is the one you have with you. In this case, a fixed lens camera whose hyper-focal range always seems to start just a little bit behind whatever I aim it at.

This is a good opportunity to point out that, despite appearances, neither I nor mah hunnybear are boozaholic liverbusters. I just happened to use booze bottles for bottling this stuff because we had a fair number of parties this year and I’m really lazy about returning bottles for cash.

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Here’s what you need in order to make these:

(*) CITRUS FRUIT — It takes the juice of 6 large lemons, or the equivalent from your other favourite round jugglechompers.
(*) JUICER — You could do it by hand but you might go insane.
(*) ZESTER — The first two batches I made zest using just my kitchen knife and a chopping block. Zester == faster, easier.
(*) CITRIC ACID — Because for some reason there isn’t enough in, you know, the fruit itself.
(*) TARTARIC ACID — Helps rot your teeth, I dunno.
(*) EPSOM SALTS — Good enough to soak your feet, helps to make your belly sweet!
(*) 2KG BAG OF SUGAR — This recipe uses more granulated sugar than water, by volume.
(*) 3 2-CUP BAGS OF HYDROGEN HYDROXIDE — See, what’d I tell you?

You’ll also need mixment containers and water heatment devices, and a whisk or stirring slave is pretty much essential.

The recipe is basically what goes down in this corner of the intarweebz. Mine comes from a friend in Kingston who saw it in a newspaper and kotofopied a clipping for me. I couldn’t find tartaric acid anywhere in Ottawa — kept getting the secret handshake wrong — so I get mine from that same friend who walks the walk and talks the talk with a dealer in Kingston.

When it’s bottling time, I just use a spoon with holes in it to lightly strain the stuff, leaving lots of little sinkers and floaters in the mix. (a) more flava leaches out of ‘em over time; (b) they scare people away from drinking up your stash; (c) I’m lazy and cheap so I wouldn’t use (and then have to clean) a proper strainer even if there was one in my kitchen.

After you’re done, this stuff has mighty potential.

You can drink it straight, but you’ll probably die of hypersugaritis.

You can mix it at around 7 parts water to 1 part syrup. Personally I like to mix it less sweet. In my mind that means I can drink more of it at a time. This same logic does not work for lightly buttered popcorn, that just tastes like packing peanuts.

You can mix it with carbonated water instead of regular water. Amaze your friends with your new soft drink! HINT: get some food colouring, this stuff comes out pretty clear when mixed with water. If you have food colouring you can confuse people by making it purple when it’s really lemonade, or green when it’s orange-flavoured.

By the way, what’s up with a 2L of soda water costing the same as a 2L of brand-name soft drink? Thanks for breaking the illusion that pricing is somehow based on what goes into making it, marketroids.

You can mix it with finely crushed ice to make a slushie type drink. Great summer trick! See above notes on food colouring.

… and then there’s the myriad possibilities of fun when you add in alcohol.