Cucumber Vodka!

So, suddenly there's all this good food in the house and it just kills me if any of it goes bad. . . which means I'm doing a lot of preserving these days. The easiest of these are the simple "turn it into a liqueur" version of preserving. Thus the cucumber vodka above. The bonus of making flavored alcohol is that the alcohol itself kills all the germs, so there's no need to do a water bath or worry about botulism or any of the other canning fears that people generally have. I will be mixing this cucumber vodka with sake in the early summer for a refreshing summer drink. I got the recipe from Infused: 100+ Recipes for Infused Liqueurs and Cocktails by Susan Elia MacNeal and Leigh Beisch, but basically you simply slice up a peeled cucumber put it into a big jar with 1 quart of vodka and leave it for a month, shaking it a few times a week. Then you strain out the cucumbers, which is what I was doing in this photo, and then put the vodka back into some pretty bottle. You have to wait another month before you can drink it. . .