Frosty Summer Drinks

Hello everyone, Cate here.

It's two weeks into my summer vacation from school, and I'm having a wonderful time with my writing! (Well, I am now that I think I've wrestled this plot into submission!)


But the danger of long, lazy summer days of writing is that I'm in close proximity to the kitchen and to the Keurig. It's so easy to fuel the writing with copious cups of coffee. And all those cups of coffee need something to go with them...

You see my dilemma?

Not such a terrible dilemma unless you want to be able to fit into your clothes after you spend the summer sitting around eating, drinking, and writing.

TIME FOR AN INTERVENTION!

I decided I needed to find some better choices. Something tall and frosty to beat the heat and keep me happily sipping.

For a couple of years now I've noticed a sign outside out local coffee shop.

What exactly does basil lemonade taste like? I've wondered, but mind you, I've never actually wondered enough to go in and buy some.

Well, usually I have the dog when I see the sign, so I really can't go in.
Cue the cute doggy picture.

I think he may need the coffee that's giving me insomnia! (Just joking!)

So I searched basil lemonade recipes. Most required making a simple sugar syrup first, but I didn't really want something sweet. Vitamix has a recipe on their site for Frosty Basil Lemonade that sounded really simple (and looked really pretty). So I made that.

Time to PULSE!

I only did half of everything because I was testing. I also used coconut palm sugar instead of white sugar, so mine doesn't look such a pretty shade of summer green.

The verdict: A bit tart. Definitely tastes like basil. Strong taste of basil. If I made this again, I think I'd reduce the basil and maybe try maple syrup as a sweetener. If you really like basil, this might interest you.

But, tasty as it was, Basil Lemonade was not a threat to the coffee.

ONWARDS!!!!

In a book I'm writing, my heroine's drink of choice is sangria tea. I decided to make a version of that. I have this cool ice tea container my eldest daughter gave me for Christmas. It makes iced tea super simple to brew.

(You can watch the 8 second video of the tea brewing :)  )

I boiled water and poured it in!  Note: I had hibiscus tea bags, but since this has a filter, I opened them and emptied in the loose tea. You could easily just brew a cup of hibiscus tea and then chill it.


Once the tea was cool, I mixed in some frozen slices of orange and grapefruit and a little of the lemon left over from the basil lemonade.

OH! Delicious!!!!!


But I wasn't done yet. I still had the Vitamix out, so I thought I'd give it a try. I dumped the tea and the rest of the frozen fruit in and in 30 seconds I had the most amazingly refreshing slushee type drink.

The grapefruit made it a bit tart, so I tried adding some blueberries to see what would happen. That did make it a bit sweeter. I think some frozen pineapple would have been amazing too.

 

I just threw some blueberries in first. Then I blended them in.

  

So there you have it - a drink to replace endless cups of coffee. I don't have an exact calorie count, but the tea has no calories so all you have is the calories from a couple of slices of orange and grapefruit.

Here's the thing. I have some peaches and tons of blueberries, and I bought ice cream today with the intention of roasting the peaches and blueberries briefly and pouring them over the ice cream.

But by the time I got finished sampling my hibiscus fruit slushee, I didn't even want the ice cream. So a good treat and I get to feel virtuous as well. WIN WIN!


Next week, my healthy version of iced coconut mocha. YUM!



And in case the drinks don't cool you enough, when I was loading pictures, I came across this one from January. 

It turns out this storm produced record snowfall in NYC! But it was a weekend so we didn't even get a snow day out of it!