not good with virgins

I'm feeling accomplished for having tried something new today.

Here's the thing. At work, I have run of the OASIS machine, which is an industrial strength blender for the making of frozen drinks -- primarily for guests' purchase and consumption, but occasionally to the end of my bribing the galley with milkshakes to do some extra dishes for me.

Most bars that carry an OASIS machine also buy into the line of OASIS mixes -- ice cream mix (good for grasshoppers and mudslides), strawberry mix (good for daiquiris), margarita mix... The list goes on. But of course, strawberry mix isn't the only thing in a daiquiri. You're going to need some rum, too, mate.

The rum has a number of uses -- being a part of the recipe, for one, and the part that has the kick to it, at that. But it also plays an integral part in the mechanics of what an OASIS machine does: turns out, you need some sort of liquid, like rum, in with the syrupy mix stuff if you want the something that comes out to be more like a drink than a snow cone.

Inevitably the question comes: what then to do about a virgin drink?

A certain kind of logic dictates that any virgin drink is simply THAT DRINK without alcohol, and so the function V of making that drink, d, a virgin, is simply

V(d) = d - A

And so a virgin daiquiri would just be strawberry mix dumped in an OASIS machine. No. Out comes a strawberry snow cone. How vexing.

Another bartender told me to splash some 7-up in the blender before the mix. Meh. Seems to work. I still find myself making too much of a too-thick drink and slopping it out into a glass and a half, and shrugging at the frowning server who ordered it as if to say, "Sorry, I'm lousy with virgins."

Today a breakthrough.

Today I made a virgin strawberry daiquiri -- by replacing the rum with pineapple juice.

It went over well. I'm not sure where my trophy is, though.