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After a tasting event we had some left over ginger ale and sarsaparilla syrups from our homemade soda kits and lots of ice so we decided to get creative and turn those leftovers into fun summer cocktails. Serve in an insulated glass to keep your slushie cool on a hot day and a word of warning, don't use metal straws for these blended drinks unless you want to re-enact the flagpole scene from "A Christmas Story."Ginger Bourbon Slushie1.5 cups ice cubes1 ounce ginger ale syrup2 oz bourbonBlend until smooth and serve.- Peachy Ginger Bourbon Slushie: Use 1 cup frozen peach slices and 1/2 cup ice.R..

If you've never had homemade grenadine, you're in for a treat. Unlike the commercial stuff, which is little more than corn syrup and food coloring, this homemade grenadine uses real pomegranates and dried hibiscus flowers. If you can't buy fresh pomegranates, bottled not-from-concentrate juice (such as POM) can be substituted. The hibiscus and pomegranate juice give this grenadine and deep, garnet red that will give any drink a brilliant crimson hue.Hibiscus "flowers" are actually the fleshy red calyx that remains after the petals fall off. The fruit with its fuzzy black seeds is usually remov..

The primary active compound in Cinchona bark is quinine, an alkaloid that treats and prevents malaria infections.  Cinchona also contains several other related compounds: quinidine, cinchonine, cinchonidine, dihydroquinidine, and dihydroquinine, which are used to treat cardiac arrhythmia and as precursors in making other drugs. While cinchona extract and purified quinine is safe for adults in low doses, consuming too much too quickly can result in an overdose called cinchonism.  The first sign of a quinine overdose is tinnitus (ringing in the ears), followed by headache, nausea, and ..

I'm a big fan of the old style of botanical illustration. Sadly, many of the older botanical illustrations were painted or printed on paper that has yellowed or discolored in some fashion, muddying the colors of the original illustration. With a lot of tinkering, I've come up with a method to remove the yellow color from scanned images while preserving the original colors. I started with images from Franz Eugen Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, downloaded from plantcurator.com. When I first started trying to restore the color in these images, I adjusted the hue, white balance, contrast, etc, b..