This is one of SDXB’s specialties, something he found years ago in a newspaper under the title “Ivory Coast Ginger Punch.” It’s easy to make and incredibly delicious.
Here’s the original recipe:
4 cups unsweetened canned pineapple juice
4 cups water
1/4 pound fresh ginger, scrubbed and cut into one-inch chunks
1/2 cup lemon juice
3/4 cup sugar
Mix the juice with two cups water in a large bowl. Whir the ginger in a blender with the remaining two cups of water. Pour the puréed ginger and water mix through a wire strainer into the pineapple juice, squeezing as much liquid as you can from pulp. Discard pulp. Add lemon juice and sugar to taste. Pour the punch into a pitcher and cover; chill about two hours or as long as overnight. To serve, stir and pour over ice to serve.
Personally, I’m less than fond of canned pineapple juice, which has a metallic flavor, so I came up with this variant, using frozen juice:
a large container of frozen pineapple juice
water
about 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar
juice from one or two ripe lemons
a good-sized chunk of ginger, cut up into 1/2 to 1-inch chunks—the more, the zingier
All these measurements are to taste, BTW. For example, pineapple juice starts out pretty sweet, to my mind, and so I don’t think it needs 3/4 of a cup of sugar(!). But if you’re a steady soda pop drinker, you may want it sweeter. Experiment.
Put the pineapple juice in a blender. Using the empty juice container as a measuring cup, add a container of water. Add the sugar and the ginger. Now purée the bedoodles out of it. Purée as though after tomorrow there will never again be a blender in this world. Once the combination has morphed into a smooth liquid, pour it through a strainer into a pitcher. Using the back of a spoon, press the liquids out of the solids that collect in the strainer.
Add three more containers of water. Taste. If you like, add a little more water. Squeeze one or two juicy lemons into the punch. Stir. Taste again. Add more sugar or lemon juice, to taste. If you have a lime, some fresh lime juice also is nice.
This stuff is irresistible. It’s great for kids and teetotalers as is. You will find, though, that it calls out for rum. Use caution! It’s so easy to swizzle down that spiking this punch could put your guests face forward on the floor.
Woulda sworn I had a photo of this, but noooo…. So here’s a Christmas photo. All the neighbors have their Christmas lights out, but the hands-down favorite is the Burning Bush. Every year this guy climbs up on a skyscraping ladder and wraps his tree from its topmost limbs to the base of the trunk in layers of lights. He has so many lights wound around the tree that he can change colors: one night it’ll be blue, another green, another white… This particular evening, he had several colors on at once.
