New Year’s Resolutions are just around the corner. And with them, come the most difficult three days of our year. That’s because January 4 is typically the day we cave on our annual pledge to exercise more, eat healthier and cut back on the booze. But in our defense, 72 hours is a really long time to do anything. (Well, except for maybe that time we were lost at sea with four Chippendales dancers, a ThighMaster and a drunken monkey.)
We always feel guilty about our failure, but it’s never enough to reverse the course toward a healthier, sober-ish lifestyle. That’s because we’re creatures of habit. And all of ours are bad.
Until now.
We recently discovered the Smartini line of cocktail mixers. Sweetened with Stevia and Erythritol (you know her, she’s Lucy Ricardo’s zany sidekick), you get all the flavor without the high calories of most sugary cocktails.
For comparison, four ounces of Smartini Margarita Mix contains only five calories. A typical margarita mix packs a whopping 100 calories for the same amount. To put that into perspective, a soda-can-size amount of traditional mix would be 300 calories, nearly three times as caloric as a Coca-Cola. And that’s all before adding a single drop of tequila.
True confessions, we’re not normally big fans of diet drinks because they’re often even sweeter than their sugary counterparts, not to mention that weird aftertaste. So the first cocktail we made, a Smartini Pomegranate Cosmopolitan, was a lot sweeter than we expected. We cut the mix with a little seltzer water and tried again. The result was perfectly suited for our sugar-free-sensitive palate. Just goes to show, like anything in the kitchen, feel free to experiment.
We’ve since perfected several Smartini cocktails: Lemon Drop, Whiskey Sour and even a great frozen Lime Daiquiri using the Margarita Mix, rum, fresh lime and orange juices, all blended with ice. They’ve even got a five-calorie Simple Syrup so you can create any sweet cocktail you like without any of the guilt.
The Smartini Label features artwork from super-hot gay artist, Clint Mordecai, which provides not just a unique look, but a wonderful connection to the GLBT community.
Soon, we hope to be able to order Smartini cocktails at every bar in the country. It’s like getting permission to drink three times as much. And that’s a resolution we can commit to wholeheartedly. Or should that be whole-livered-ly?
$9.99/bottle
www.smartinistore.com
