@Moon Star: Haven't been in one of those in forever. Then again a lot of restaurants are still kindly being asked not to serve alcohol after a certain time so the all you can drink plans are not very popular.

Akili Li wrote:Oooh, small pots of the herbs themselves? That's brilliant! About the only way to keep the mints under control, too...
hmmm

Right, let me just check how many small pots there are out in the garage. I bet I could do something with that!

Yep, I thought that was brillant too. First time I saw something like that and I've been to a few super fancy restaurants.

On the topic of ice cubes I only make coffee ice cubes for ice coffee. Or ice lattes. Perfect for the summer.

Fancy ice cubes seem like a really fun way to spruce up drinks, it's too bad they make everything so watery though. I've got these like plastic ice cubes with liquid in the middle, so they freeze to make the drink cold, but as they melt all the liquid stays in the plastic. It's a great solution, but I always forget to put them back in the freezer when I'm done 8U

That's a clever method to deal with it.
I usually don't mind it being watered down, because whatever you've put into the ice cube usually has flavor, so you're releasing more flavor along with the water.

Plus it's fairly easy to do things like mix some lime juice into the water before you pour it into the ice cube tray, or use tonic water with a few drops of bitters (for offsetting something super sweet like a fruit punch), or some other flavoring.

A few drops of rosewater into each of the cubicles of the ice cube tray before you freeze it would work, or you could straight-up make tea or juice first and use that instead. But I can forget what ice cubes are which flavour, so I don't tend to use the methods that make the liquid opaque. If I can SEE what I've got floating in the cube, it's easier to tell what sort of flavour it will have, and therefor what flavour of drink it will best blend with.

I know it's long since past "too late" to try and not seem like a complete eccentric to my friends and neighbours ("that crazy lady" to the ones who aren't so friendly), but I don't want to serve them something that's totally unpalatable by mistake!
(Apricot juice and fennel tea make an AWFUL mix, just as a side note. It's a bad one to mistake.)

I don't think I've ever had fennel tea before but I can definitely see it wouldn't work.

Now you mention it I sometimes put rosemary in my ginger ale ^^

And I LOVE mint lemonade. Despite hating mint.

I've never made fruity icecubes, it sounds like a really cool idea!

I often make tea icecubes in summer. That way I can add more tea - but frozen - to my tea.
My son copied the idea and now we also have milk icecubes xD

See, I've thought a lot of times about making milk ice cubes, but something in my soul is like "no, that's against nature"

I think it's the thought of the condensation collecting on it, like watery milk

Which is overall pretty silly, logically I think milk ice cubes would be fine.

@Akili Li, I've never had either fennel tea or apricot juice, so I'm really curious why together they'd be terrible, hahah.


@HanafuruLove, You'd hate me, but I regularly mix milk+coffee liquid and add in ice to keep it cold (basically a homemade iced capp), which at some point becomes watery milk.

But milk that has been frozen is definitely gross, it leaves like ice crystals once melted and tastes weird. So just so you know, never keep milk bags too close to the back wall of the fridge, lmao.

So my instinct had a reason behind it after all, then LOL. I always keep my jugs of milk in the fridge door so I've never experienced it first-hand. I did have a thing of lettuce get frozen to the back of the fridge the other day, though.

Oh, do you have milk in bags? My friends in the USA are constantly making jokes about me having bagged milk because I'm Canadian, but I've never in my life seen milk in a bag. It seems like it would make it kind of hard not to spill it everywhere.

Thawed milk is gross indeed.
But frozen milk is just a whitey icecube, nothing much of a difference with water icecubes.

And if you are using it into another liquid (my son mainly adds them to milk, I've added them to my tea) it does not make much of a difference that they were formerly frozen.

HanafuruLove wrote:Oh, do you have milk in bags? My friends in the USA are constantly making jokes about me having bagged milk because I'm Canadian, but I've never in my life seen milk in a bag. It seems like it would make it kind of hard not to spill it everywhere.

Another Canadian in the house, then? :D
And yeah, we have milk in bags. We basically have a specific pitcher for it (ours is like 20 years old, lol) and you just… put the unopened bag in it, smack the pitcher against the counter a couple of times to make sure it's properly lodged in there, and then cut off a tiny corner! No spills and no mess (unless your hole is excessively huge, then it's spill galore!) and it doesn't take much room, so it's perfect, really. :)

Amura wrote:Thawed milk is gross indeed.
But frozen milk is just a whitey icecube, nothing much of a difference with water icecubes.

And if you are using it into another liquid (my son mainly adds them to milk, I've added them to my tea) it does not make much of a difference that they were formerly frozen.

Yeah, I'm assuming that if you just dissolve them in another drink it probably doesn't have the awful texture of thawed milk! Sure sounds yummy in tea, too!