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Summer drink ideas

4K views 40 replies 18 participants last post by  cerise 
#1 ·
Bought a watermelon yesterday, unfortunately it wasn't really sweet... /img/vbsmilies/smilies/frown.gif so today I blitzed the watermelon in a food processor with some sugar and lemon juice and poured the puree in a dish, now in the freezer making crystals. The goal is to make watermelon granita! Should feel great in this heat.

What are your ideas for summer drinks, simple or complex, alcoholic or not?
 
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#4 ·
A friend is addicted to making what she tells me is known as 'dishwasher vodka'. She makes them with fairly bog-standard brands of vodka (1 litre bottle) so a diaster or two on her trials, didn't cost the earth!

She removes about one third of the bottle and then adds her sweeties or fruits of choice, usually hard, British boiled sweets like butterscotch or peardrops or sherbert lemons. She bashes the sweeties until they are in tiny pieces, almost a powder using about 250g og whole sweets per litre. She then puts the resealed bottle through a short cycle in the dishwasher, where the heat is enough to melt the sweets. I found the resulting drinks far too sweet for my palate, but she tells me most of our friends adore them as a cocktail. She even melts flavoured, good quality (70 per cent plus cocoa solids) chocolate into the vodka, and jeklly babies or wine gums.

Me? I'll just stick with my favouries... A Bombay sapphire gin with a slice of lime and good tonic water, a Pimm's or a campari and soda!
 
#5 · (Edited)
I love a nice, cold sangria. A local bar makes a lovely pomegranate sangria. A friend once brought a white sangria to a barbecue and it was delicious, too. Looking around on the internet, I think he probably used Martha Stewart's recipe, which seems less sweet than most recipes sound.

http://www.marthastewart.com/349612/white-sangria

And, I can totally see sipping one of these on a hot evening:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Blackberry-Gin-Fizz-51104460

Oh...and my favorite new drink from last summer: An Effen cucumber vodka and soda with mint leaves and a squirt of lime.
 
#8 ·
I need to drink a lot and i need to drink fast (sipping something in the heat is impossible for me) so i can't do alcohol in the summer.  I also tend to get leg cramps at night and a friend who gets really bad ones says quinine helps.  Hmm.  So i take schwepps tonic water, grapefruit juice and pineapple juice in a large glass and throw a few frozen rsapberries in in lieu of ice cubes and to give a nice flavor/scent. 

I make iced tea a lot, but i like it a little sweet, so i make sugar syrup for it, nice black tea, fresh lemons and sugar syrup. 

Although i hate flavored or herbal teas in general there is one i love when it's cold, Hibiscus tea (Karkade') is a beautiful and very appealing jewel red and tastes a little like regular tea with lemon.  Very refreshing. 

Finally, I drink a ton of hot tea with a little milk - and sit in front of a big fan.  Believe it or not, it cools me off and quenches my thirst. 

But this year, i can't believe my luck - it's still pretty cool (upper 60s when normally this time of year it's in the upper 80s) - every cool day more feels like one more day of life! 
 
#9 ·
FF: I don't know if your on Pinterest but one of my Boards has alot of nice summer time drinks.

Cocktail and drinks These are just some of the things I have pinned (if you can't find me , let me know). Have you or anyone else checked out the beautiful boards from ChefTalk ? You would be tickled pink to see who's food was pinned there . I hope you all get a chance to check it out.
 
#10 ·
Another good summer drink: A friend of mine has been making really lovely homemade ginger beer for the past few months. It's great on its own but it also makes a wonderful cocktail, called a Moscow Mule. Squeeze half a lime into a glass and drop the lime into the glass. Add a few ice cubes, followed by a shot of vodka. Top it off with the ginger beer.
 
#11 ·
I'll be trying my hand at soda brewing this summer, personally. I'll probably attempt some ginger beer - partly because homemade ginger beer appears in quite a few summer cocktails it seems. aside from the moscow mule chicagoterry mentioned, I've heard of something called a dark and stormy - good ginger beer on ice with a dash of dark rum. As for nonalcoholic I really enjoy brewing a pitcher of good quality green tea, sweetening it up a bit, and tossing in a few orange slices. simple but incredibly difficult to stop drinking. 
 
#12 ·
I've been drinking a lot of Dark-n-Stormys the last few weeks.  Ginger Beer and Goslings Black Rum-it's great.  I also make a variety of rhubarb syrups that I use to flavor soda water or mix into cocktails for early summer.
 
#13 ·
I make iced tea a lot, but i like it a little sweet, so i make sugar syrup for it, nice black tea, fresh lemons and sugar syrup.
I do the same Siduri, I make Sun Tea, much less acrid as the basic Lipton-hot water-steep method. I add a sachet of dried mint leaves and makeup a cruet of simple syrup out of local raw honey (DH has terrible seasonal allergies and the raw local honey helps him). Now I'm not really one for sweet tea, but with the honey is very nice.
 
#14 ·
I do the same Siduri, I make Sun Tea, much less acrid as the basic Lipton-hot water-steep method. I add a sachet of dried mint leaves and makeup a cruet of simple syrup out of local raw honey (DH has terrible seasonal allergies and the raw local honey helps him). Now I'm not really one for sweet tea, but with the honey is very nice.
I've made that too, kaneohegirlinaz, but for tea i always use whole long-leaf orange pekoe - it's a good black tea but the fact that it's unbroken leaves means the tea can get strong without getting so bitter, and the orange pekoe (orange being the color not the fruit!) is a particularly fragrant tea - but not with fragrances added, but simply the wonderful smell of real tea. I find if i make the iced tea with the long leaves, i can do it the hot water method without problems, as long as i remember to take it out before the crust forms on the top/img/vbsmilies/smilies/smile.gif

Sometimes, because i don't sleep well in the summer, though, i use teabags, twinings decaf english breakfast, and that one is better done cold.

You should try some tea that's not lipton. Of all the teabag tea I've had in the States, that is really the foulest. Others are not so bad. I don;t get teabags here because Italy is definitely not a tea country. It's made extremely weak, practically the color of white wine. As one of Joyce's characters said, "When i makes tea, I makes tea, and when I makes water, I makes water."
 
#19 ·
You can stop leg cramps by drinking dill pickle juice. Works pretty fast, tastes pretty good after the third swallow. Also, get some potassium tablets.
so i've heard, but pickle juice isn;t preventive. You have to get up in the night to drink it. My friend tried everything, and now takes quinine pills. I don't have such a big problem but i do like the bitterness of schwepps and the juices.
 
#21 ·
You can stop leg cramps by drinking dill pickle juice. Works pretty fast, tastes pretty good after the third swallow. Also, get some potassium tablets.
Yes, nocturnal leg cramping is a sign of low potassium. Should you decide to drink pickle juice, then you also have to watch the sodium level.

@ FF: strawberry mojito's make for a nice change. Also if you like margarita's then all you have to do is buy lime sorbet, add tequila, rim of sugar or salt (or not) and garnish. Makes for an easy drink, no fuss.
 
#22 ·
I know this is a food forum, but if your nighttime leg cramps are not fixed with the tonic water and pickle juice, vitamin B supplements help a great deal.  I used to have trouble falling and staying asleep and started taking one of those a day and it has improved a great deal.  Everyone's a doctor these days!
 
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