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My Name Is Shannon, and I Have a Shrub Problem
I love making shrub. You know — flavor-infused vinegar syrup. It’s all the rage at farmers’ markets and in trendy bars and restaurants. Mix it with sparkling water and it’s a delicious non-alcoholic beverage; mix it into any number of cocktails and it’s, well, an even better cocktail.
You can also add it to salad dressings, cook it into chutneys, pour it over ice cream (no, really, try it, it’s AMAZING).
It’s expensive to buy — we were paying fifteen bucks and up, for small bottles — but, as it turns out, so easy to make! Vinegar and sugar, plus whatever flavoring strikes your fancy. Put it all together in a mason jar in the fridge, shake a few times a day for a few days…and voila! A little flavor explosion, ready to decant into fun bottles and make pretty labels for.
So…a hobby was born.
In the last year alone, my husband and I have made: strawberry, strawberry-balsamic-black pepper, basil, mint, basil-mint, ruby grapefruit, Meyer lemon (both with and without zest), lavender, peach, nectarine, blueberry, blackberry, lemon lavender, honeymoon melon, blueberry-basil, and I know I’m forgetting at least half a dozen.
It all started when we moved away from Portland, Oregon (hush, I know), to an island an hour’s ferry-ride from big-box stores and affordable farmers’…
