Sakabatou

I rather doubt that this constitutes cooking per se, but today I will give you my recipe for hot ginger lemonade. For the last two months or so I've been cutting back on my drinking dramatically. I have found that as I get older, alcohol starts to disagree with me more and more. I can become quite hung over even without ever having been drunk. So lately I've been trying to find something I enjoy drinking socially that doesn't make me ill.

One of the best drinks I made was mixing so-called "near-beer" (de-alocoholized) with ginger ale. In fact, because the near-beer is usually hoppier than real beer I actually like this better than with real beer. But eventually I found that I had quite a large pile of bottles to dispose of. In Japan, disposing of waste is cumbersome... You have to sort it into the correct piles, put it out on the correct day, and if you make a mistake it gets sent back to you with an utterly incomprehensible message informing you of your epic fail. So I don't like to throw things out any more.

This meant that I had to discover a new drink with a much smaller garbage footprint. A few months ago, when I had a cold, my friend Naomi introduced me to a ginger tea that people often drink. It's just a powder with ginger, sugar and vitamin C. It makes a relatively nice beverage. I thought I could make something better with real food, though. And this is the result:

Hot Ginger Lemonade

* 1 1/2 tablespoons of honey
* 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
* 1 or 2 slices of fresh ginger
* 500 ml of very hot water.

Mix them together in a teapot and let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes. The ginger flavour gets more intense over time, so I actually like to drink this over a period of an hour or so.

I hope you enjoy it!