Round 2! and how you can help earthquake relief efforts in Western China

Was going to make a cream soda for Saturday, but I'm not totally satisfied with my recipe yet...  my sister Sarah gave me some helpful tips regarding vanilla beans so hopefully we'll have it down by next week.

In the meantime, since it's been a busy week with Tony away in Mississippi until yesterday, we decided we'd repeat the flavours we did last week - with a couple of major differences:
1. no peeling of the ginger. it's a gargantuan task when it's 10lbs of ginger root
2. no peeling of cucumber - we've been curious whether the skin on the cucumber will add more foam to the soda, and if there will be a noticeable change in taste.

And there was a serious earthquake in Qinghai province, in western China 3 days ago. It's a very remote, mountainous and poor region of China, and while the scope of the damage was nowhere near close to the huge one that rocked Sichuan province in 2008, this nonetheless has affected a population of people that is still in relief supplies and aid, with the death toll over 1000 as of today.

10% of sales on Saturday will be donated to the earthquake relief effort. I'm still deciding which organization to give money to, but it will probably be Red Cross or Mercy Corps.  Google has a very convenient link to relief organizations working in the area if you wish to contribute.

Our first scale up!

Our first scale up and soda party was a success! It featured a lemon-ginger ale; cucumber, lime & sea salt, and a root beer.  No terrible technical issues, no meltdowns and no sick guests.  Weather was beautiful this whole week so it was a tad tough to be indoors all day Saturday peeling 8 pounds of ginger and juicing an insane amount of lemons & limes, but it was worth it.

The first thing we had to do was make the root beer on Friday night... the sheer amount of spices we used made the apartment smell quite wonderful (or as our roommate noted: "even the trash smells good!"). The photos below of the cardamom, star anise, juniper and vanilla don't quite do the aroma justice.

Saturday involved juicing piles of citrus fruits by hand (for some reason we don't own a citrus fruit juicer yet which means Tony and I had to juice the limes & lemons using forks.  

Peeling the 20 cucumbers was much faster

and of course our Ruby 2000 (our little beast) just made quick work of everything, pumping out liters of wonderfully fragrant green liquid.

We spent Saturday evening carbonating the three kegs, attempting to shake all three kegs evenly and learning tricks from various homebrew sites for best carbonation.  The 3 kegs then sat in our gigantic freezer over night.

Apple & ginger soda; and cucumber, lime & sea salt!

This past rainy Saturday we had a visitor to our kitchen - Liza from Dirtyhandsny.com (a project through the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, about everything DIY in New York).  We took the opportunity to try out two totally new flavors - apple & ginger; and a cucumber based soda.  Also, this was our first time using our monster of a juicer - the Ruby 2000, which is now dominating one entire corner of our kitchen.

We juiced 5 green apples and a big chunk of ginger, to make about 900ml of liquid.  No sugar was added (the apples were sweet enough and we wanted to keep the tart nature of the green apples present).  The mixture was filtered and poured into our trusty soda siphons for carbonating.

The second soda we wanted to dry was inspired by the (hopefully) upcoming warm weather season.  We're huge fans of cocktails using cucumber and gin, and thought we would try to make our own mixer.  Again the Ruby 2000 made quick work of our 5 cucumbers, producing about 800ml of juice.  We tried again to use mint, but haven't figured out how to extract a fresh mint flavor without using huge piles of mint.  Even steeping mint in hot water didn't quite produce the effect we wanted - none of the really fresh mint flavor came through.  

So it was improvisation time - we rummaged through our fridge and realized we had a whole bag of limes.  We juiced 2 limes, then added the lime juice to the cucumber juice. The tartness of the limes is a great contrast to the mild, fresh cucumber juice.  

Lime zest was added to our simple syrup (1/4 cup of sugar), which was then added to the juice to balance out the lime juice. A tiny pinch of sea salt was added to bring out the all the individual flavors.