Amp up your summer ice cubes with these 10 cool ideas.

A scorching Summer calls for cool beverages – preferably iced. But where’s the fun in run-of-the-mill ice cubes? Sure, they cool things down, but they also dilute many an iced coffee or a cocktail, which is not okay. This is where flavored ice cubes enter the scene – they’re easy on the eyes and add more taste than water ever did. Impress guests (and yourself) with these 10 flavored ice cube ideas.

Coffee

Cool down your coffee without diluting it! Freeze coffee that you would normally drink hot and throughout a sizzling week, use the cubes in your daily cup or blend them into a smoothie for some extra coolness and caffeine.

Herbs

Wow a crowd by adding chopped herbs to an ice-cube tray. Cool water with cubes infused with chopped mint leaves and dried ginger and bring extra taste and sophistication to the table.

Coconut Water

Coconut water has an electrolyte balance similar to human blood, so it’s super nourishing. Add coconut water ice cubes to an smoothie or glass of water in place of regular water ice cubes for a refreshing energy kick.

Colorful Fruit

For a beautiful presentation, add raspberries and blueberries or slices of pineapple, mango, and other sweet fruit to an ice-cube tray. They not only make a glass of water look festive but also leave it with a fruity hint that intensifies with each sip.

Edible Flowers

This one is mostly for show. The summer is all about outdoor barbecues, pool-side treats, and nature. Ice cubes with colorful edible flowers sprinkled in simply fits the bill.

Lemon Juice

Save the slice. Freeze lemon juice, and cool down on a blistering Summer afternoon with a tall glass of water with lemon ice cubes.

Old Wine

Old wine can be salvaged! Freeze remaining wine into cubes and melt them on the stove top into recipes that call for wine. And don’t dilute that sangria with water ice cubes, use red wine ice cubes instead to retain the alcohol level (very important) and taste.

Wheat Grass

It may be one of the healthiest juices on earth, but it sure doesn’t have a shelf life. Wheatgrass in its liquid state goes rotten quite quickly. Freeze the juice into cubes and use them in smoothies or use them to cool fruit and vegetable juice, all the while offering you some blood-cleansing benefits.

Milk

Milk ice cubes can be added to a hot cup of coffee or tea to cool it down but bring up the richness of the drink.

Chocolate

Melt dark chocolate, let cool to room temperature, and freeze into cubes. Toss the frozen chocolate cubes into a glass of milk. As the chocolate melts, you have yourself an increasingly richer chocolate milk that is as fresh and cooling as it is decadent and delicious.

Aylin Erman currently resides in Istanbul and is creator of plant-based recipe website GlowKitchen.

The post 10 Things to Turn into Ice Cubes appeared first on EcoSalon.

The frappuccino gets a major health revamp.

While it is high in calories, sodium, and cholesterol, it’s really the sugar content that blows one of Starbucks’s beloved beverages out of the water. Starbucks’s Caffe Vanilla Frappuccino Blended Smoothie contains 310 calories per 16-ounce serving, in addition to 3 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 220 milligrams of sodium, and 67 grams of sugar.

Sugar will go straight to your head, give you a short-term high, and then leave you lethargic and glum. It spikes your blood sugar levels, leads to weight gain, is nutritionally empty, contributes to candida, and, to put simply, is actively bad for you. If you are going to consume sugar, get it from something a bit more decadent and lasting than a down-in-a-hot-second drink, regardless of how delicious it may be!

My version of a vanilla Frappuccino smoothie is sugar-free, save for the optional chocolate syrup glaze and whipped cream, using a few drops of zero-calorie, low-glycemic stevia instead. The recipe also goes a step further by replacing cow’s milk with almond milk. Almond milk is a mere 40 calories per 8-ounce serving and avoids the common issues that arise when ingesting dairy, such as hard-to-digest proteins, hormones, depletion of enzymes and vitamins through pasteurization, saturated fat, synthetic chemicals, and a boo-ing cow.

Cutting corners in so many other ways, it’s up to you whether you want to indulge with a topping of whipped cream and chocolate syrup. You can find vegan variations of both in your local health food store.

Enjoy!

Sugar-Free Vegan Vanilla Frappuccino

Ingredients:

• 1 cup coffee cooled
• 1 cup almond milk, soy milk, rice milk, or skim milk.
• 1 banana
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 handfuls of ice
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 4 drops of liquid stevia, or 2 packets of powdered stevia
• Whipped Cream (optional)
• Chocolate Syrup (optional)

Directions:

Combine all ingredients in a Vitamix and blend until smooth.

Bon Appetit!

Aylin Erman currently resides in Istanbul and is creator of plant-based recipe website GlowKitchen.

Image: Starbucks

The post Nutritional Breakdown: Vanilla Frappuccino appeared first on EcoSalon.

Did you know that if you swallow your gum, it will hang out in your stomach forever? Such are the legends of childhood burned in our brain. But what’s truth, what’s myth, and what’s there simply to scare us into good behavior? After all, aren’t all the best nursery rhymes really about avoiding bubonic plague and possibly flesh-craving wolves?

But not all food is so frightening. We decided to debunk some of our strangest myths about food – check out what we found!

Double dipping your food is dangerous.

This is TRUE. Yes, many of us all familiar with George Constanza and his double-dipped chip. (And if you are not, click here immediately.) But will the double-dipped chip really make you sick? Yes, it turns out that it could. Experts say that double dipping a chip can transfer about 10,000 bacteria from the eater’s mouth to the dip. So if you at a party, that means 50 to 100 bacteria can travel from one mouth to another, courtesy of the dip. And sure, we like our friends. But do we really like them that much?

If you drop food on the ground, you have five seconds before it is contaminated.

And yet, this is FALSE. First of all, nasty bacteria such as Salmonella (which causes food poisoning) can live on surfaces for over four weeks. If you drop a piece of bologna on tile, 99 percent of the bacteria will practically instantly adhere to the cold cut. If you drop it on wood, around 68 percent of the bacteria moves onto the sandwich meat. If it is on a carpet, .5 percent of bacteria makes bologna its new home. And it all happens instantly. Still want to eat it?

Fresh fruits and veggies are more nutritious than frozen ones.

This is FALSE, and score for the refrigerator set. (Like the jet set, but cooler.) Some of this has to do with fruits and veggies high carbon footprint. Fruit and veggies are at their best nutritional levels right after they are picked from the vine. So the farther they have to travel to your mouth, the more time they have to degrade. When you properly freeze something, you are essentially halting its degradation. But look for clumping in your frozen bag of goodies – if there’s clumping, it is likely the food thawed on travel.

Eating at night makes you gain weight.

This is FALSE and is really a matter of word play. And yes, before Oprah and her minions set upon me; allow me to introduce the science behind it. The time of day of consumption does not reflect on how much weight you will gain. The reason you gain weight is because you consume more calories than you burn. If you have consumed less calories during the day and have a larger meal at night, you’re not going to gain weight. Does that mean you should pig out right before bed time? Heck no, because if you want to maintain your weight, you should always budget your calories .

You can cure a hangover with food.

This is FALSE but man, I wish this were true. Now that I am older and learned, I drink less. (More emphasis on the older and less on the learned, but still.) But “back in the day” (I’m also holding an ear horn to my head right now) I used to party like it was 1999 for about eight years running. So I became well acquainted with epically-bad hangovers.

And I swore that slices of plain, whole wheat bread were the key to lessening my barf-marathon. But in actuality, they weren’t. You have a hangover because you drank too much and are dehydrated. (So, yes, drink a lot of water. But you’ll still going to feel terrible until the excessive alcohol is out of your system.) You’ve also over-taxed your liver, which is less able to supply glucose to all the needed parts and causing all these yucky feelings. The only true cure to a hangover is not to drink so much alcohol in the first place.

Image: Triple Tri

The post ‘Double Dipping Will Kill You’ and Other Strange Myths About Food appeared first on EcoSalon.