I'm really ashamed to say.












Taylor, $4.99 a bottle

was drinking Tuaca, then remembered this concoction I made based upon some recipe for preserving fruit.

You take various fruit and layer them in a barrel, packed with sugar. fruit, sugar, fruit, sugar, etc. Then you cover the whole pile with some sort of booze. I used vodka and a bottle of Laird's applejack that had to be forty years old (cleaned out of my dad's pantry, I remember seeing it all though childhood).

Anyway, this is good for fruit presevervation, you just keep adding fruit to it as you go along. So, in the winter when oranges we're in season and we couldn't keep up with them, I'dd toss them in the mix rather than in the compost, then came strawberries, cherries, blueberries, apples etc. Peaches are rearing their fuzzy heads now.

Anyway, I skimmed some of the booze part off and I am sipping that. sweet and syrupy. You don't really want more than a little bit of this.

So what do you do with ALL that fruit that has congeled at the bottom ????

I'm not sure, I'm thinking blend it up and make some kind of summer drink/smoothy thing.

Got any ideas?

Well there is always fragrent garden torches ( with all the absorbed booze ) !!!

Nope. But, I have been drinking some Yerba lately and enjoying it.

All my alcohol has been given away now... I want a goddamn beer.

I like the illicit looking paraphanalia, makes people nervous. I've got a leather encased gourd (I can't believe I just wrote that) and a couple bambillas that give the appearance of criminal activity.

Then again there is always fruitcake for the holidays...

Lol! I just have some of the tea a friend sent... I would love to have a gourd some day though. I wanted to see if I liked it first. I do, so someday...
(my friends think I'm a freak and are used to me pulling out weird stuff, so they would just ask what it is)

I actually quit coffee over the weekend so its just mate' for me now. I think my Nexium has been causing some skin issues for me so since I quit the acid reflux meds I have to quit the main source of acid (outside the body) as well.

interesting......


my coffee intake has dropped from 7-8 per day to less than one per week... and I too now have some fairly major skin-blemish issues.

Any ideas/thoughts, anyone?

On a side note, check George Gaylord Simpson's Attending Marvels for mate', mate' gourds, bombillas, and generally the art of the mate' cebador as practiced in Argentina in the 1930s. Pp. 113-118 of the Time Inc. edition -- those softbacks with the distinctive smell to their ink. You can find these books in used-book places by scent.

Well, they're saying now that coffee is a system cleanser, helping the liver along. And since your skin is an organ, maybe the impurities are taking that route out of you now. Or it could be that the coffee oils you've built up are being purged out of your skin. Take your pick! More water intake will help clear it up, either way.

Dammit. I have two cans of 10 oz. Buds sitting on my desk, one full and one for ashes. Guess what I just did?

Either way, I'll bet you drank some ashes.