Hm… my usage of girly kitchenware in the pictures are sure to further speculation that I’m really a girl and not a guy. But hey, that shouldn’t matter, right? *Curtsies*

The other day, life doth handed me free lemons - thusly, I doth made lemonade. Now, I’ve never really made lemonade from scratch. Mostly because the price of lemons is just too high to justify squeezing them to make juice. Maybe if you bought them in bulk it’d be worth it. Or, perhaps if you went on a fruit collecting trip.

But usually, I get lemons for free from relatives who have the trees and don’t know what to do with the fruit. So, conveniently for the 3 dollars or less limit - the price of lemons is going to be zero in this recipe. Actually, the only other ingredient that actually costs money is the sugar. I looked up a number of different recipes on the web, and settled on a version of this one to try:

Lemonade

4-6 lemons — Free
1 cup granulated sugar — $0.25
Water
Ice

Total: $0.25

You want to make a sugar syrup so there isn’t sugar crystals swirling around in the lemonade. Combine about 1 to 2 cups water with the sugar in a small pan or pot and heat until the sugar dissolves all the way. While that’s going on, juice the lemons so that you get about a cup of juice. Usually about 4-6 lemons.

Mix the sugar syrup and lemon juice in a pitcher. Add about 3 cups ice and then 4-6 cups of ice water. I like to use ice because it decreases the time you need to refrigerate the mixture before it’s cold again. Usually you still need to refrigerate it 15-30 min. Serve in glasses with ice.

Well, as you can see, it’s no wonder why kids are pushed to start up lemonade stands. The margin is enormous if you happen to have the free lemons.

The above recipe felt kind of off to me - in fairness the author said that it would make a very, very sweet lemonade. I think I would have cut the sugar by even 1/2 next time. But I like lemonade that’s very mild. I do think the simple syrup idea helps out a lot, as opposed to trying to get pure sugar to dissolve in ice water.

Continue reading “Lemonade” …

I had been planning on posting this during the week to coincide with the upcoming Halloween candy-fest. Things have a way of popping up to spoil all my well laid Cheap Eats plans. Like my car zonking out - long story; we’ll stick to reviewing instead…

Anyhow, I received some samples of Slammers Ultimate Milk by Bravo! Foods Int’l Corp in the mail from Matt the other day. What they’ve done here is packaged up fairly standard chocolate and strawberry flavored milk with some very popular candy brands. Supposedly, these milk drinks are supposed to be shelf stable for 6 months, more healthy than other milk drinks and fairly decent in price.

But the big sell is definitely going to be the candy names. I got Milky Way, 3 Musketeers and Starburst Slammer drinks. Those are three names that most people know about. The actual Slammers logo on the package is quite small, which is probably a smart thing for them… they want to push the big brands.

And I think it might work for a lot of people. The biggest question for me was: do these drinks actually TASTE anything like the candies in question?

I have to admit that my expectations were way too high. After all, it’s a DRINK. Mr. Unreasonable Cheap Eats editor was planning on having a Violet Beauregarde (from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory) gum chewing experience. You know, the one where she chews a piece of gum an experiences a full turkey dinner (? can’t remember if that’s correct).

I was fully expecting to take a swig of Slammers and suddenly have the sensation of actually eating a Milk Way, 3 Musketeers or Starburst. Yeah, I know. Delusional.

I started out with the Milky Way Slammers. These bottles are the larger ones, by the way, at 14 ounces. They also carry a smaller 8 ounce size. The Milky Way one is actually supposed to be reduced fat chocolate milk.

Continue reading “Slammers Ultimate Milk” …

[Edit: If you came here from Digg, hello. Once again, this is NOT my own recipe] I’m not sure about you, but when I was a kid I absolutely delighted in creating strange and inedible food concoctions. These early period “food pastiches” inevitably included ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, mayonaise and salad dressing. The trick then was to try to make it an inviting color (usually through liberal dashes of food coloring) so that an unexpecting parent would try and drink it.

I didn’t have much success back then, but those memories are part of the reason I still enjoy messing with food today. So, a combination of the hot weather blasting us, my need for something to drink at rollerhockey and money being short as usual, I decided to see if I couldn’t mix me up a batch of Homemade Gatorade. I mean, how hard could it be to make salty flavored water?

A plethora of Gatorade recipes exist, and though some of them rely on things like Potassium Chloride (salt substitute branded as Nu-Salt?), fructose and Kool-Aid mix, the basic ingredients are pretty much water, salt, sugar and some flavoring. I decided to have a shoot-out of Homemade Gatorade versus the real stuff since I had a couple bottles of Gatorade leftover.

Here’s the basic recipe I picked, I went with one that featured OJ because that’s what I had (apparently you can get some potassium from the OJ?)

Homemade Gatorade Recipe

1/2 cup orange juice — $0.15
9 tbs. Sugar — $0.03
3/8 tsp Salt - negligible
2 liters (approx) water - negligible

Total: $0.18

Using boiling or hot water can make things go faster, but you’ll need to chill it down somehow before fridging it. So just mix everything together and see if it tastes like Gatorade. Does it? Read on…

Continue reading “Making Homemade Gatorade” …

In the days of yore, back when normal sized candy bars were 25 cents a piece, I used to drink a lot of soda. Generally, we didn’t get a whole lot of name brands like Coke, Pepsi, and 7-up at home. We used to get cans of “fake” soda like Shasta.

Actually, there wasn’t a whole lot of soda drinking at home. It was mostly on camping trips when we got soda.

These were usually syrupy sweet carbonated concoctions that would melt teeth outright if you kept it too long in your mouth. It was best to gulp these down. My favorites were the articifical grape, black cherry and strawberry sodas. Only kids could love this stuff.

Flash forward to the present, and we happened to pick up some Welch’s Strawberry Soda which came in the ubiquitous fridge pack. I know it’s not a generic brand soda, but it was as cheap as one: $1.99 for a fridge pack. Difficult to pass up, seeing as we needed to re-fill our soda stock.

Let me just say that this soda is so sweet that I felt like I was going to go blind or something from drinking it. I bet if you let all the carbonation escape it might make a nice strawberry topping for shave ice.

Nevertheless, it brings back some good memories of Shasta soda when I was young (I know they still have this on the market). Little kids love sweet drinks - it fuels their inexhaustable energy reserves. I remember recently trying to drink one of those “Hi-C” type box drinks and I just couldn’t believe how sweet it was.

Continue reading “Welch’s Strawberry Soda” …

… Annnd in the challenger’s corner, recent fruity upstart made real by a secret cabal of Coke marketeers: Black Cherry Vanilla Coke. Now make way for the reigning champion, the sweet but burp-inducing beverage, the one and only Pepsi-killer: Vanilla Coke. Now let’s get ready to rumble!

Well, truthfully the fight’s been fixed. Black Cherry Vanilla Coke has already won in a forfeit. Good ‘ol plain Vanilla was put out to pasture at the start of this year for reasons yet unknown except to Coke insiders. It had a good run. It was delicious. And now it’s gone.

I’d been waiting for the “replacement” ever since reading the press release about Vanilla’s demise. Sure enough, last week during a Target Xmas Gift Card shopping spree I saw the fridge packs of Black Cherry Vanilla Coke and picked one up to review.

I was actually just going to review the new flavor, but since I had 2 cans of Vanilla Coke leftover, I decided to waste one of these potential Ebay hot OOP products (I’ve been wondering if we’ll see them being sold as the days go on) to do a comparison taste test side by side. So today, I lined them up and poured myself two glasses of the different soda flavors. Incidentally, I highly do not recommend drinking two cans of soda in the morning after a full cup of coffee. Buzz-city.

Hm… today I think I’ll actually divide up the review in sections, like a “real” reviewer would. Maybe this will attract more companies to send in freebees:

Packaging:

Let’s start with the can design first. Both use the signature Coke red, silver and white for the can, and both varieties have some “yellowish” streaks that I supposed stands for vanilla. Vanilla Coke included an abstract piece of art that I didn’t really like. But then again, how do you draw vanilla beans so that people will know what they are? I think people might think it’s peas in a pod or something.

Black Cherry Vanilla Coke has a picture of two cherries floating in water which is kind of cool. However, the writing “Black Cherry Vanilla” is actually quite small and is vertical on the can which makes it difficult to tell at a glance what it is. Vanilla Coke has the letters emblazoned diagonally across the can in much larger letters.

I think it’s a tie as far as packaging goes. I would like to see the “black cherry vanilla” in bigger letters on the can, but the older Vanilla Coke wasn’t so hot in the design. But hey, who really cares about this stuff right?

Continue reading “Black Cherry Vanilla Coke” …

[Ed. Note: Earlier, someone created a petition to bring back vanilla coke. Well, yes it seems to have come back (no need to write in to tell me!)… I’m going to close comments on this post for now, unless they decide to take it away again. Remember, I wrote this post in 2005. Thank you all for commenting.] We now interrupt your regularly scheduled Cheap Eats candy birdwalk programming to bring you this news: the Coca-Cola company is planning on phasing out Vanilla Coke at the end of 2005.

This is sad! Vanilla Coke, I hardly knew ye. Coca-cola brought it to market in 2002 along with Diet Vanilla Coke a year later. They did this pretty good marketing push, I remember I was eager to try it even before it was out. But now they say the sales are slipping. So where did all the Vanilla fans go? Could they really have gone over to the “dark side” which is of course Pepsi (a much hated drink around Cheap Eats).

I always thought Pepsi was lame because they were asked what they thought of the new flavors (vanilla / lemon / lime) that Coke came out with, and I remember a marketing bigwig (now fired most likely) saying “Oh, that’s not going to have ANY affect on the market. No one’s going to buy THAT.” Then a few months later they came out with those flavors of Pepsi! Lame.

While we normally don’t give a dang about name brand soda at Cheap Eats, Vanilla Coke totally kicked ass. It wasn’t as cloyingly sweet as normal cream soda. For awhile there, it was actually somewhat difficult to find at stores, at least on sale. We contented ourselves with picking up Vanilla Coke Fridge Packs for $3 each at Target whenever it cycled around to being cheap. I didn’t stockpile any Vanilla Coke, though you can be sure that I’m going to go out soon and load up the SUV.

Continue reading “Vanilla Coke : You Will Be Missed” …

I recently received this triple pack of so called Hawaiian Natural Tea from my parents so I decided to run it through the Cheap Eats ringer. Actually, it IS from Hawaii (company is from Honolulu). The flavors of the boxes were “Mango Peach”, “Pineapple Strawberry” and “Passionfruit Orange”. Sounds like typical flavors for Hawaii. I picked the Passionfruit Orange for a taste test.

First, I guess it is marketing, but what’s with the need to put “Natural” along with Hawaiian Tea? That makes me think there’s some Unnatural Hawaiian Tea which doesn’t sound very good indeed, especially since we are talking about leaves from a tree here. I guess they mean the other items in the tea are 100% natural, or perhaps that the tea is organically grown.

Speaking of that, the ancient persons (from China) who originally came up with marketing dried leaves in your hot water as a beverage is a genius. Yeah, I know there are tea-people (just as there are wine-people, coffee-people etc.) who only insist on the finest teas and can easily tell the origin and quality of a single tea leaf, but that’s not me. I will do Lipton as likely as I’ll do Oolong Tea grown from a single mountain in Taiwan (not kidding, we have some of this at home).

Anyhow, to the tea itself. There are 8 tea bags or packets in each box and they contain a mix of organic green and black tea. The side proudly proclaims “No Carbs, No GMO’s (genetically modified organisms, no kidding) and Rich in Antioxidants, Calories 1″.

That is a good start I guess, but for Cheap Eats we care about price. Tea is pretty expensive especially when you’re talking about dried up leaves. But if you go with either bulk bagged stuff or hand scooped leaves from specialty tea shops (there are many near me) instead of packets like this, I think it comes out much cheaper. I probably wouldn’t splurge on a 3 pack gift box like this one, which will run you about $8.00 or so for 24 packets.

Continue reading “Hawaiian Natural Tea” …