 Hi everybody, my name is Sheridan, I work at the Long Beach Public Library and I'm here today to show you how to make a couple of cool mocktails that'll keep you cool this summer. If you haven't signed up for some reading just yet, go to longbeach.beanstack.org and register for our reading challenges and then that way you can earn prizes and other cool stuff for reading this summer. If you've already signed up, enter the code summer into the activities tab of your reading challenge to be able to get points for watching this video today. Cool. All right, the first thing I'm going to show you how to make is a cucumber lime mint fojito and so what I've got here is a cucumber lime that I made earlier. It is two large cucumbers and what you do with the cucumbers is you want to peel them and then I always end up cutting them in half lengthwise sort of like this and with a spoon I go through and I remove all the seeds because they kind of have a bitter flavor. Once you've done that with those two cucumbers, you put them in a blender along with the juice of four limes, two tablespoons of agave syrup if you're you know partial to it, and a cup of water. Blend until smooth and you end up with the base that's going to be the base for our cucumber lime made fojitos. Okay, so what we're going to do is I'm going to take a couple of mint leaves and I kind of just rip them off and throw them in the bottom of a cocktail shaker glass. I forgot my wooden spoon so I'm just going to use the sheet of this knife as a little bit of a muddler kind of thing and you just kind of want to you know bruise them up a little bit to release the flavor and the aroma. I'm going to add two ounces of the cucumber mixture and you want to stir it around because it starts to separate. I'm going to make that like four ounces just so you can see really what happens. I'm going to add two ounces of water an ounce of agave. Now if you don't like your drink super sweet you can always cut this down to half an ounce or you can use honey or simple syrup really whatever you've got on hand. You want to add some ice to the cocktail shaker and shake it up so it combines and then strain the whole thing. So you pretty much got the drink done at this point you can always garnish with a you know little wheel of cucumber if you feel like it and maybe a little spring of mint tossed in there and you've got your cucumber fojito. Okay so the next thing I want to show you how to make is a blackberry mint kind of spritzer thing. What we're going to do is take a few blackberries and throw them into the bottom of a cocktail shaker glass you know just a few and throw in also some mint leaves and what we're going to do with this is we're going to muddle them together to break down the blackberries and release the aroma of the mint. You really want to go to town on these blackberries because once they get broken down that's what releases their color and their flavor and if you don't really do a good job with breaking them down then the drink won't really have that kind of blackberry feel you know. So as you can see it's a little more work than originally so for this you could use a muddler or the back of a wooden spoon really whatever you've got on hand that could work to smash up some fruit in the bottom of the glass looks like that's pretty good we're going to add to this an ounce of agave but you could use simple syrup or even honey if you've got that on hand. I'm going to add a couple of ounces of lemon juice hold the seeds the chunk in there so two ounces of lemon juice and two ounces of water we're going to add some ice to the shaker some ice to the glass that we're going to pour the drink into and shake this bad boy and strain it into the the glass that you and so you can see that the blackberries once they get really broken up release their color release some juice their flavor into the drink and you end up with you know a little more tiller. You also want to for this one throw on top some club soda or some mineral water I've got this topochico here kind of just do like a quick little float on top to give it some fizz not too much just a little bit so that bad boy a little bit and then garnish with some mint and blackberry and then you've got your blackberry mint spritzer the cool thing about these two drinks is that since we put two ounces of water in both of them what you could do is if you wanted to turn these mocktails into cocktails is replace that two ounces of water with your own special ingredient either one of these would go well with vodka and I would or even like gin for this one also with this cucumber mint limeade the cool thing is that you can do mint for example to sort of get that mint flavor but you can also combine it with things such as basil if you wanted to do like a cucumber basil gimlet or even jalapeno if you wanted to do more of like a cucumber jalapeno margarita yeah thank you for joining me today hopefully these drinks can keep you cool all summer long and you participate on our summer reading challenges and earn lots of prizes see you around okay take care