Homemade Vitamin Water Take Two

With fresh fruit locked and loaded I was ready to make some more, hopefully even tastier, vitamin water.

Having already done this before I was able to mix these up really quickly.

Top left: Black berries, Lime, Cucumbers
Bottom left: Strawberries, Oranges
Bottom right: Watermelon, Mint
Top right: Raspberries, Honey dew melon

This jar containing kiwi and strawberry obviously didn't stack well with the others.

On a real vitamin water high I also mixed up this mixture of pineapple and oranges. My husband loves these two citrus fruits so it seemed well worth a try.

I even made a mini drink containing kiwi and raspberry.

Waiting is really the tricky part.

Results:
Blackberries, Lime, & Cucumbers -bleh. no thanks. tasted too much like lime rind
Strawberries & Oranges -I may have let this one sit too long. afraid of the orange zest I just didn't bother :(
Watermelon & Mint - very light taste. extremely refreshing.
Raspberries & Honey dew melon - light. mostly tasted like honey dew
Kiwi & Raspberry - not too sweet. not too tart. totally enjoyable
Orange & Pineapple - tasted really strongly of orange, my husband is so used to "artificial" and "natural" flavoring added to drinks he thought the drink wasn't sweet enough

Homemade Vitamin Water

I used to love vitamin water, but I had an incident where someone slipped drugs into mine and it left me unable to stand the taste of it. Years before that even happened my husband, a die-hard sports nut, told me that under NCAA guidelines vitamin waters contained banned substances and that college athletes were being told they couldn't drink it.

These banned substances included taurine, L-theanine, green-tea extract and glucosamine. Withing a week of the link I provided you above vitamin water was given the green light. Hmmmmmm.

After dealing with the intense thirst that accompanies gestational diabetes I decided to try my hand at making my own.

For starters I chose to only make two.

One contained frozen pineapple and mango chunks along with some fresh mint.

The other contained a frozen mixture of berries (raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries).

Making these was simple. Just put your fruit in your chosen glass container, fill it with water, and then put it in the fridge for a minimum of 1 - 4 hours to let the water infuse. I left mine overnight.

The resulting concoction was okay but not what I was hoping for. We did however find that the drink tasted even better later in the day than in the beginning.

Still very interested a few days later I made a couple more.

The one on the left has (frozen) blueberries, line, and cucumber. The one on the right has cucumber, lemon, mint, and ginger. These were pretty disgusting. The one on the left had way too much lime and the one on the right was just a bit of an amalgam of nasty.

I'm going to have to try this again with fresh fruit.

Saturday Snack - Avocado Chicken Salad Cucumber Sandwiches

I really want to make sure I help get as many of my trials in creating dishes and snacks that are gestationally diabetic friendly so I've decided to at least occasionally post a Saturday and Sunday snack for you.

It's both hard to remember and hard to think I haven't mentioned my intense love of avocado but if it hasn't managed to come up yet - I absolutely adore avocados.

Today's snack is relatively quick and easy.

You will need:
Cooked or canned chicken - it's really your preference. Either way your chicken will need to be shredded.
Avocado - the amount you use is again up to you. I had half of an avocado cut and didn't use it all.
Salt
Pepper
Lemon or lime juice
Cucumber
Optional - Tomato
Optional - Fresh mozarella

Place a small amount of shredded chicken in a bowl. Add a little avocado and mix. Only you know how "wet" you want your chicken salad to be. I only used a few fork fulls of avocado - so maybe about 1/4 an an avocado.

Add a healthy squeeze of lemon or lime juice.

Salt & pepper to taste.

Set that aside and slice yourself a bit of tomato and/or fresh mozzarella. I only had mozzarella.

Wash and slice off a few pieces of cucumber.

Plate your noms and you're good to go!

You can either eat these as an open-faced sandwich.

Or a regular sandwich.

Ultimately I preferred to have it as an open face.

Making Fridge Pickles

We ran out of pickles. We'd have two jars in there. One jar had sweet minis (or something like that) and the other were sliced Claussen (again, or something like that). I had decided that once I was out of pickles I would just make my own because I really love knowing exactly what's in our food.

I have quite a few pins about making your own pickles but opted to use this one for the time being and the information found here at its source.

I went to the grocery store and picked up some organic cucumbers.

When I came home I soaked them in a 1:4 ratio of white vinegar and water to try to get any nastiness they may have encountered off of them and also to help them last even longer if I found myself without the time to make them that same day.

After an hour of soaking in that I rubbed the cucumbers all over with my hand, dumped out the water, and then cracked a tray of ice over top of the cucumbers and added water.

I did this with the intention of letting them soak in ice water for 4 hours to help make sure I had nice, crispy pickles.

Wanting to make sure the water stayed pretty frequently "iced" I came back from time to time to freshen up the ice situation in the bowl I was keeping the cucumbers in.

Then, I washed them with my Fit wash just to try to make sure they were good and clean.

Before I set to work I made sure to once again sterilize my jars. Now when you sterilize a jar and then put something in it you really should put the item into the jar as soon as you can after removing the jar from the hot water. Not wanting to crack my jars because I was soon going to be putting something less than boiling hot into it I let them sit while I worked. This was all really more a matter of me wanting them clean. They were already clean but they'd been sitting about so this is what made me feel best.

Cut off each end of your cucumber. Compost these later.

Then prick each cucumber 3 - 4 times with either a corn skewer or a fork their cans.

 My cucumbers were a pretty decent size as you can see so I just cut them all in half and hoped for the best when it came time to put them in their jars.

Each jar that will eventually be holding your cucumbers will need, a few peppercorns, 1 - 2 sprigs of dill,

and a sliced glove of garlic.

Four jars was just my estimate at how many I was going to need for this.

Here's an attempt at a close-up of the inside of one of the jars.

Pack the cucumber in as tightly as you can. They really don't need a lot of head room.

Now to make your brine; you will need 3 cups of vinegar, 9 cups of water, and 3/4 cup of kosher salt.

Bring this mix to a boil until the salt has dissolved.

Ladle your hot brine over the cucumbers, try to get any air bubbles out of there,

seal, and place in a water bath for 7 minutes.

When you took them out they didn't look a bit cloudy.

After a few days they should begin to look like pickles.

Now let this all sit for at least a month, you want to make sure the brine has gotten a sufficient chance to really do its job.

I intend to spend my month eyeballing them and wondering what terrific taste might possibly lay in store for me if I just continue to be patient.