Wow!  It’s been a super crazy week and I’ll try and get to most of it and post things over the next couple days as it has finally calmed around here!  All good stuff for the most part, just a crazy busy week for sure!

The cool thing is our soda flavors came in and we’ve been playing mad scientist all week long, perfecting our mixtures.

The flavoring needed for a batch of pop is really quite small… only 1/8 ounce of flavoring!  The 6 bottles we got are each 4 ounces total.  So that is 24 liters of pop for each bottle!  Not too bad at all.  144 liters of pop.  17 cents a liter.

We’ve perfected our simple syrup recipe as well…  it’s a trick to get it as thick as you can, but still thin enough to get it to pour into the carbonated water.  We take 20 ounces of water and heat it in a pan and then add one cup of sugar at a time.  We can get to 3 cups of sugar before the water starts getting a little thick.  Once it’s cooled down a bit, we divide it into 4 jars of 8 ounces each.  Each jar gets 1/4 ounce of flavor and it will make 2 liters of pop.

So for 3 cups of sugar we get 8 liters of pop.  I’m not sure how much sugar is in a bag of sugar, but it’s at least 8 or 10 cups I would think.  Still, I think it’s cheaper than buying the soda, and it tastes fantastic!  It tastes that like that fancy Jones soda.  Which around here is not cheap, close to like $1.50 a bottle.  12 ounces.

The biggest surprise was the cola flavor.  We are very much Pepsi snobs and I had in my mind that we were not going to approve of the homemade cola.  The first sip you are thinking, well, this is not Pepsi.   But it’s not like OH MY GOSH THIS IS AWEFUL….  rather it’s the second sip that you say, Hmmm…. this is not bad.  It’s like BETTER Walmart Soda.  (haha)  And it grows on you very quickly and is pretty good.  I still like the rootbeer best, and the grape is good, so it the cherry and orange.  We haven’t tried the cream soda yet…  I’m not really sure if I like that flavor or not.  But I figure we’ll give it a try at some point.

Now that we’ve gotten away from the artifically flavored Sodaclub mixes (which are not too bad and grow on you as well….)  I really LOVE the Soda machine!!  I am so hooked.   We even ordered a couple extra bottles so that we can have cold water waiting to make pop when we need it.  I find that we are drinking less, because we still treat it like a special treat.  I LOVE the fact that we are not generating a ton of those cans and bottles. No more lugging home a bunch of heavy 2-liters.  And I like that we know EXACTLY what is in our own pop. No more corn syrup!  Yah!

Having watched a couple shows and read a couple great books, I am trying hard to eliminate all the corn sweetened products from our diet.  Corn everything!  We already do eat pretty simply, that is, whole foods, not packaged this or that.  I’m convinced that it’s not the greatest thing for us.  We’re slowly loosing weight and that is just from the shedding of fast foods, corn-sweetened pops and convience foods, and anything in a box.  More fruits and veggies, less meat, and just simple eating, homemade and slow.

Sure, we get out of synch a day or two, or if we’re super busy or out and there just isn’t time for a sit down eat-out meal, yes, we’ll grab MickyDs…  or a pizza, but it’s getting now to be less and less during the month and I’m totally sure that’s a good thing.

And now we have great tasting pop at home without all the cans and bottles for about the same cost and we love it!!!   I highly recommend the Soda Stream machine!!  FUN!!!!

www.sodastream.com