You end up Sunday night with one last crisp, cool salad, one perfect fresh peach and one perky lime slice for your last Corona of the weekend. Much easier to do if you start with a well-packed cooler. Here, three tips:
1) Freeze your beverages rock solid. Single serve sodas, half gallons of lemonade or iced tea. Only freeze sturdy plastic bottles with screw-on tops to contain the expanding ice. Plastic bottles with snap-on tops? The plastic safety strip will tear and slush will ooze into your freezer. Cans will bend under pressure and the pop top rabs will burst. Milk, especially low-fat, freezes OK in a paper carton. Never freeze half-and-half; it curdles. You have to plan ahead to have some thawed and some thawing drinks. Never freeze beer.
2) Carefully open the cardboard on an empty box wine, salvaging the empty plastic bladder. Rinse well, fill with clean water and freeze. With a little creative squeezing, you can mold it around your cargo for custom fit in a small cooler that keeps the maximum ice touching the maximum beer bottle surface. Half thawed, it makes a nice cold pillow in the small of your pack or a cold treatment for sunburn or speains. Fully thawed, it's a cool drink of water, and it's one more recyclable container you won't have to carry home.
3) Keep a sharp knife in the cooler where your lemons and limes are stored. Attach a bottle opener by string or magnet to every cooler in camp. No sadder sight than an unopened beer.
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