Bogging Juice

Although keenly priced in the conselho (local authority area) of Lajes das Flores at €4.25 a year for an unlimited supply, I don't like drinking tap water. Not because I think it's going to poison me or anything (Carol drinks the stuff by the bath-full with no ill effects), it's just I prefer to drink something else. In this very hot weather, it's important to have something cold in the fridge. I do like sparkling mineral water as long as it's not too - well, "minerally" - and Agua Castello fits this bill admirably:-

(Looking at that picture, I've just noticed it has a gratuitous apostrophe before the A of Agua so presumably it must be pronounced "Huh!-Ag-wa Ca-stello".)

Anyway, the problem with 'Agua Castello is price: even in the cheapest shop in Santa Cruz, each of these wee 25cl bottles is €0.35 bringing it in at a corking €1.40 per litre (considerably more expensive than petrol or even our dry white wine of choice I can tell you) so 'Agua Castello is a luxury and not for common or garden thirst-slaking.

As 'AC is the cheapest mineral water on the market, what was required was some plain ordinary juice - ginger, as it's called in the west of Scotland. So, we were down in the village shop yesterday afternoon perusing the juice shelf and I was just about to pick up a bottle of passionfruit flavoured Sumol (product placed to death in our fave Portuguese soap opera, Morangos com Açucar) at €1.75 for 2 litres when my eye alighted on a bottle of Unipreço (the Portuguese equivalent of Aldi or Lidl) pêssego (peach) flavoured Iced Tea more competitively priced at €0.95 for 2 litres: sold.

At this point, allow me a digression acerca de that peculiarly American drink, iced tea, which we Brits are not really familiar with at all. It reminds me of the funniest query I ever read on a Tripadvisor forum: "My husband and I will be touring Scotland, England for a day this fall and what we want to know is, if you go into a diner in Edinburgh [you can just hear her pronouncing it "Edin-boe-roe"] or Glasgow [rhyming with cow] and the waiter puts a pitcher of iced tea on the table, is it free or are you expected to pay for it and, if so, is it acceptable to say you don't want it?" I kid you not. I don't know what I found more hilarious: the notion of pitchers of iced tea in a "diner" in Edin-boe-roe or that anything might be free in Scotland!

Anyway, back in Fajã Grande, at the counter Linda the padroa says "Yeugh! You're not buying that are you? It's just coloured water and a load of E-numbers, you know!" Undeterred, the purchase is made but right there on the spot Carol immediately christens Unipreço pêssego flavoured Iced Tea "bogging juice" - talk about not giving something a chance! Anyway, we got it home and checked the ingredients on the back:-

Now you don't have to be an emeritus professor of Luso-Iberian Linguistics to tell that the only natural ingredient there is the Água. The last line translates as "Contains a source of fenilalanina". When I googled that, all I got was a Wikipedia page in Spanish which contained such unreassuring sounding words as neurotóxico and hormona adrenocorticotrópica - is drinking bogging juice going to make me grow breasts? And it doesn't exactly look very wholesome either: as you can see from the picture below, it's the colour of dark ...

... whisky (what did you think I meant?) But in actual fact, when it's cold enough it tastes just fine: more apple than peach, I would say, but not a problem. So, with the cold beverages having been taken care of, it was time for another of our classic lunches: tinned frankfurters (Nobre is the brand of choice) on a bun with Dijon mustard:-

All, of course, washed down with lashings of bogging juice.