This is a recipe made with Hurricane Rum, a small batch rum from Nantucket, MA, that is aged in bourbon barrels. It is very light gold in color and has a flavor more reminiscent of whiskey than of a traditional rum. If you can’t find Hurricane Rum, I would recommend making this with 2 parts gold rum to 1 part bourbon or bourbon-style sour mash whiskey.

Tropical Storm

Ingredients for two drinks:
6 oz Hurricane Rum
1 lime
1/2 Kirby cucumber (small pickly-sized cucumber)
1/4 cup chopped cilantro plus 2 sprigs
2 Tbs brown sugar
Ice

1) Add ice to shaker and 2 martini glasses.
2) Squeeze lime juice into shaker.
3) Add brown sugar and chopped cilantro to shaker.
4) Cut two thin slices of cucumber and reserve. Chop remaining cucumber finely and add to shaker.
5) Muddle ingredients with wooden spoon.
6) Add rum and shake.
7) Remove ice from martini glasses, pour drinks. The little bits of chopped cilantro will come through the strainer– this is okay.
8) Add cucumber slices and cilantro sprigs as garnish.

I know this should have Wasabi in it, but…

Lemony Snicket

Ingredients for Two Cocktails
Juice from 1 lemon.
6 ounces Broker’s or other English Dry gin
1/2 oz Rose’s Lime Juice
1 Tb evaporated cane juice (you can use plain sugar or Sugar in the Raw)
About 15-20 leaves of Cinnamon Basil**

Fill 2 martini glasses with ice & set aside.
Reserve 4 basil leaves & set aside.
Fill shaker with ice.
Add lemon juice, cane juice, and Rose’s lime.
Chop remaining basil and add to shaker.
Muddle ingredients.
Add gin and shake.
Remove ice from glasses.
Pour drink!
Garnish with remaining basil and serve.

**Cinnamon Basil is a kind of basil that tastes slightly of cinnamon. If you can’t get cinnamon basil, use regular basil and a tiny, tiny bit of Saigon (or other not-sweet) cinnamon.

I am going to try to do a better job of documenting my cocktails. This is one I made this weekend. And yes, it has a Pirates of the Caribbean pun for a name.

Blackstrap Bill

Ingredients for two cocktails
6 oz. black strap rum (Cruzan, Gosling’s Black Seal, etc.)
1 Ruby Red Grapefruit
1 oz Ginger syrup
10 leaves Pineapple Sage*
Ice

Fill 2 rocks glasses with ice and 1 pineapple sage leaf apiece & set aside.
Fill shaker 1/4 full with ice, add pineapple sage and ginger syrup, muddle.
Halve grapefruit. Slice two wedges and add to glasses. Juice rest of grafruit, then add juice and remaining pulp to shaker– do not add pith or skin.
Add rum.
Shake, pour, and serve.

*Pineapple sage is a type of sage that actually tastes faintly of pineapple. If you cannot get Pineapple sage, do not substitute regular sage. Try mint or basil instead.

As an additional note, I would like to tell you all that Chobani Yogurt just wrote to me offering me free coupons as a thank you for blogging about them! Awesome!

I am almost better from the thrush so I will definitely start the yogurts back up soon.

Here are some ideas for foods to do after yogurt:
1) Soup. It would be easy to pick a type of soup. I could either do chicken noodle or something like lentil or vegetable minestrone.
2) Vegetarian meats/packaged tofu/seitan/tempeh products.
3) Macaroni and cheese.
4) Another boxed dinner product, like couscous or those prepared rice packets.

Destiny recently started posting about her attempts to go shampoo-free, so after asking her about it and doing a little reading of my own, I decided to do it, too!

I have always heard from stylists that shampoo is very bad for my hair and to only use it once every week or two, but to condition it every day. So when Destiny started talking about not using shampoo at all, I have to say I was immediately intrigued.

I started reading up. The most valuable information I found was from this WikiHow article. It was a lot to absorb, so I kept reading up and read a lot of other opinions and reviews of the book it was based on, Curly Girl, by Lorraine Massey.

The idea is pretty simple: most shampoo contains chemicals called sulfates which are used to strip oils. This is good because it strips out all the non-water-soluble products you use in your hair, but it is bad because it also strips the natural oil out of your hair and dries it up!

So, to repair your hair, you need to stop using shampoo with sulfates. However, in order to do that, you need to stop using hair products that require sulfates to get them out of your hair! These products are products made with silicones, which are…well, you know what silicones are. They’re plastics! Lots of hair care products have silicones in them because silicones coat your hair and protect it from all kinds of junk, and also work to glue split ends back together, but they also keep the natural oils in your hair from getting soaked into your hair like they should, and they also need sulfates or other harsh chemicals to come out!

So it is pretty simple: if you want to use silicones, you have to use sulfates. Sulfates damage your hair, so if you want to not damage your hair, you have to use neither sulfates nor silicones. This means changing your hair care regimen to only use silicone-free hair products. If you do this, you will never need to use any shampoo!

I told my mom about it last week, and she told me about this guy she used to know who worked for her father. Pete had really long, beautiful hair and he always said that they key to his beautiful hair was that he only shampooed it once a year, on his birthday. My mom said it never looked dirty or greasy. So that, combined with reading Destiny’s writeups and lots of testimony online, convinced me.

The next step was getting the products. Thursday at lunch, I went out to do this! This is tough, because there are a lot of ingredients that are silicones. Most of them end with “cone” but not all of them do! Fortunately, I found a huge list online.

And now I will let the video tell the next part!

I made this video four days ago. In spite of reading many warnings that my hair might look worse for the first few weeks, it immediately looked amazing! It has looked really good every single day since I started it Thursday night. Even today when I washed it at night and slept on it, it doesn’t look too bad, and I have never been able to do that before.

There will be more updates on this as I go! If anyone has questions they would like to ask me about the process please feel free!

So, if you’ve noticed, The Yogurt Diaries are on a short term hiatus.

This was an unplanned hiatus.

Why?

Because Sunday morning I felt a little ill. The typical sore throat, tired type thing. Monday, same dealio. I went to work and all, I was just…bleh.

Tuesday…still sick. So I go to the Resident Nurse in our office building and have her check me out. She’s chatting away and then asks me to stick out my tongue.

I do.

“You’re very dehydrated,” she said.

“I can’t be,” I said. “I just drank a twenty-ounce ginger ale.”

“Your tongue is white,” she said. “That’s a sign of dehydration. How much have you had to drink?”

“Well, the ginger ale this morning,” I said (this was at ten AM), “and I went through a pitcher and a half of water last night.”

“Stick out your tongue again,” she said.

I did.

“The only thing I can figure,” she said. “Is that you have thrush.”

“What?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve heard the term but I have no idea what that is.”

“It’s a fungal infection you get in your mouth. Usually only babies get it.”

“How weird! How can you tell if someone has it?” I asked.

“Because their tongue is white. Here, do you want to see?” She offered me a handmirror.

Hell yes, my tongue was white. “Oh my god!” I said. “It is white. How do people get thrush?” I asked.

“Usually only babies get it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an adult with it.” It took her a few tries to come out with the next part, but when she did, she finally asked, “Have you been with anyone…in that…you have had oral sex?”

“Definitely not,” I told her. “Unless I wasn’t informed of it.”

So, yeah. I have a disease that people get from breastfeeding and cunnilingus! Go me.

Yogurt is actually supposed to cure thrush, but since it is the only thing I had eaten consistently for the past week (and some days I will not lie, I had four containers in a single day), I think it is probably a good idea to wait to bring it back in full force.

In the meantime, I want to ask you all a question. I am well more than halfway done with my yogurts, so I would like to decide what else I should do. I would like to move on to a different food, but it has to have these qualifications:

–It must be something that I can reasonably eat once a day without it affecting my health (like, you know, giving me thrush).
–It must be something that I can afford to eat every day for a meal (top cost $3-4 although I would be willing to do something that had a couple outliers for comparison).
–It must be something that comes in several brand names that people can shop for.
–I would prefer that it be vegetarian, but I would be okay with doing something like, say, chicken noodle soup. I just try to avoid eating too much meat. It doesn’t have to be vegan, though, and things like soup broth or gelatin are things I’m more willing to compromise on than say, hot dogs.

So, if you have ideas or recommendations for things I can do next, let me know!