Well, Why Not?!

I'm feeling pretty froggish today, so I'm just gonna leap!  Let me preface this by saying that the snow has me feeling a little boxed in and I'm aching for escapism right now.  Earlier I was thinking, "What's so darn great about snow?  It sucks."  Then it hit me.  Snow is totally awesome in Summer!  When you eat it!  So I searched the great interwebz for how to make Sno-Cone syrup.  It's totally easy.

Take one package of Kool-Aid, mix it with 1/2c sugar and 1/4c warm water inside something with a tightly closing lid, then shake it like crazy.  Then after the syrup is cooled, make a big snowball and pour the stuff over it.  Eat.  Repeat as necessary.  Our snow today was all powdery, so I just scooped a big bowl and patted it down.  This totally hit my sweet craving!
So then I did the dishes.  A friend brought me a whole chicken for dinner last night, and I plopped it in the crockpot with some spices.  I made a gravy out of the drippings, then served it with pretty basic rice and these awesome 40 minute bun/roll things.  SOOO yummy!  Well, anyway.  Then I didn't do the dishes until 8pm the next day, and I hate cleaning the crockpot.

I tossed all the contents into a 5 gallon pot with a few liters of water, and I am boiling it down for the stock.  I was considering making soup or stew, but I have no noodles.  What point is chicken soup without noodles?  No point, that's what.
I'm pretty much completely snowed in here, since our car isn't exactly the most snow worthy vehicle (I love my Volvo though!), so when I got a craving for sodapop I was sad.  Then I decided to make my own.  I've made ginger ale a few times and I love it.

So I made a simple syrup with 2c blueberries (frozen), 1c water, and 2c sugar.  I boiled that for a while, about 20 minutes.  I accidentally forgot about it and it boiled over (see the icky mess on my stove top?!)  I strained it once to get the berries out (saved those for pancake toppings for tomorrow breakfast), then twice through a washcloth to get all the seeds and whatnot.

Then I poured it into two-2 liter soda bottles, added 6 to 7 cups of warm water (think around 90 degrees), and 1/8t dry active yeast.  I just love feeding sugar to yeast.  My heart does a little happy dance for all my little yeast buddies who had to live in the refrigerator for so long, but now get to swim in warm water and gorge themselves on sugar.  I don't know why.  But it makes me happy, so that's cool with me!  Then I put the caps on and shook 'em up.  Now I gotta wait 2 days or so for the carbonation to build up, but I am SO excited, and it gave me something to focus on this cold cold evening!