No-Calorie Flavored Water

 Well, duh! When left alone, water is the original no-calorie beverage. But for some reason, humankind is just not content to leave nature alone. (In more ways than one.) Poor water, our most precious resource just doesn’t get the respect it deserves. For some reason, society thinks it needs to be “improved” before they will consider drinking it.

My husband falls in that category. He claims the military ruined water consumption for him, and the way it’s provided to personnel in the field probably does make it unpleasant to drink. Still, it was an obstacle I wanted him to overcome. He needed to lose weight, and strenuous exercise is not an option when you have MS. Neither are the so-called calorie-free “beverage enhancers” with artificial colors and flavors.

Out of desperation, I started experimenting with infusions of garden peppermint and the peel of abundant citrus I had during the winter. My husband actually liked the combination of orange and mint. With a substitute he could tolerate, we began the process of cutting out the sugary fruit syrups he was using in his water. He’s lost 50 lbs. since last fall. Though it pleased me to find a solution, it came with a couple of downsides. The first one was preparation. It takes time to chop mint and peel the zest off an orange. Then the solids would need to be strained out of the water once they did their job. Even though I’m not working outside the home right now, I still have plenty to do. I also knew my mint and citrus supplies would dwindle in the summer. Mint doesn’t like high heat, so it goes on hiatus here in Texas during the summer, getting scraggly with increasingly smaller leaves. In the quest to keep to my single ingredient mission, I found my convenience products in a couple of places. They are in the small bottles pictured above.

The larger bottle is orange oil. The smaller is ingestible mint oil. Note, I said oil, not extract. I purchased the orange oil from King Arthur Flour. The mint oil is produced and sold by Piping Rock. It may be possible to find orange and mint oil in your grocery store. Check the baking aisle first. I will warn you that sticker shock may occur, especially if you get a large bottle of citrus oil from KAF. (They also have lemon and lime.) However, these oils are incredibly concentrated. For a 16-20 oz. container of water, you only need 1 drop of each flavor. I call that economical, as well as guilt-free.

The Project Queen