Drink Hacks

Overheard:

Hay: "When it comes time to bury you, I'm going to bury you on your side."

Chairman: "Why would that be?"

Hay: "If I buried you on your back, you'd keep the entire graveyard awake with your snoring."

Chairman: "It won't bother me - I'll be dead."

Hay: "I wouldn't bet on that.!

In September I published a blog post about artificial sweeteners and their adverse effect on the gut microbiome and have since given up on using them, or any artificially sweetened products. 

While putting brown sugar into a full cup of coffee and stirring it is not a problem, it tends to linger at the bottom of a small espresso and having to stir it for a while brings the temperature down very quickly. To overcome this, I've started to use a dash of maple syrup with my morning espressos, which disperses immediately and tastes delicious.

Maple syrup, however, is quite expensive when compared to the sugary coffee condiments you can purchase from supermarkets specifically for this purpose - the Monin syrups. I've looked at the ingredients and there seems to be no monkeyed around chemicals or corn syrups in it, which surprises me.

Another food hack I've developed is mucking about with cloudy apple juice, which I mix with about 5 x the amount of water and keep in a bottle in the fridge as a very effective and inexpensive thirst quencher. 

During the first lockdown, Lidl's Naturis cloudy apple juice wasn't available and so I started using Clawson Press' cloudy apple juice with ginger from Tesco - it was delicious, but hideously expensive at £2.30 a carton, as compared to Lidl's £0.80. To recreate this I simply bought some ginger root from Lidl, peeled it, and cut it into French fry sized chips, which I store in the freezer and add to the Lidl cloudy apple / water mix as needed. One ginger root will last months and I only decant the ginger chips from the bottle when the taste dictates, which might be every 5th or 6th refill of the bottle.