— Maria Allen

For many, many years I have written about the deliciousness of a shrub. A shrub, as you may know, is a vinegar based delicious, delicious beverage that actually began right here in Philadelphia during the Continental Congress. And uh, it was a way of sort of cleansing your GI tract, uh, so that you would remain healthy. And it was something that George Washington drank all of the time. So I'm going to show you the easiest way to make a shrub that I think tastes rather delicious. So the base ingredient, of course, is going to be a vinegar. And I have two vinegars here. I have a cucumber lemon, and I have a fig. I'm very fond of the fig vinegar. But what I have found over the years is that when you tell people that you're going to make them a shrub, first of all, the name alone might intimidate anyone a little bit. So I'm gonna show you what we're going to do today. Our ingredients for this include some seltzer and includes a glass of ice. I like to reuse, uh, peanut butter jars. And this is about two tablespoons. And you can see the golden deliciousness of the, uh, vinegar. So it's sort of like what you did in your science class. Uh, do as you order add acid to water. So first I'm going to pour some beautiful, beautiful seltzer and then I'm going to add my vinegar. And I like to serve it with a metal straw, which also serves as a swizzle. And then the other thing you can do is I pre froze some raspberries. And the raspberries will help to keep the beverage chilled, but also add a little bit of color so that your guests aren't quite so intimidated. And I went out to my yard this morning and picked up a little bit of some fresh mint and I'm ready to enjoy this summer beverage. So I would say eight ounces of a seltzer to two tablespoons of a delicious balsamic vinegar. Make sure that it's balsamic. However, I have also made them with, um, excuse me, apple cider vinegar and they taste good, but not as good as this. So there's your summer beverage to enjoy. And I also got some rosemary today 'cause I wasn't sure what kind of direction I was going in, but you can see it looks good. It tastes delicious. It's called a shrub Google use your favorite kind of vinegar. Uh, these vinegars are from a vinegar shop on South ninth Street in Philadelphia. If you're a Rocky fan, you know that in Rocky one, that's where he ran down the street, but he didn't stop at the vinegar store.