Cleaning up a "Dirty Shirley"

While we were on vacation in Hawaii, we stopped at Pancho and Lefty's Cantina in Kona for some drinks and lunch and discovered a very refreshing summer drink for hot afternoons.  The "Dirty Shirley" is basically a Shirley Temple with vodka.

Original:

• tall tumbler 3/4 full of ice
• 2 shots Vodka
• fill to almost the top with Sprite
• splash of grenadine
• garnish with a lime - or cherries if you're old school

But looking at the ingredients in grenadine, we noticed that the first ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) - (Here's a video about why we don't like HFCS - but sorry, it's LONG).

Since we've started living a little cleaner and healthier, we wondered if there was a way to clean up this Dirty Shirley a little.

So here's what we came up with.

Instead of Sprite we used unsweetened Talking Rain - Lemon Lime flavor and reduced the volume of this to make room for more POM.  Since the Talking Rain is unsweetened, we added a squirt of "Sweet Leaf - Sweet Drops" (lemon drop flavor) made from stevia (which is zero calories).

Sweet Leaf - Sweet Drops can be found at Super Supplements and other health food stores.  Instead of grenadine we used POM pomegranate juice and doubled the volume of this.



Our cleaner version: 
..."Slightly Inappropriate Shirley" 

• tall tumbler 3/4 full of ice
• 2 shots Glass Vodka
• fill (but leave an inch) with Talking Rain
• inch of POM
• squirt of Sweet Leaf lemon stevia drops
• lime slice

We got the idea for this because we read another article from CherylStyle on how to make homemade grenadine using stevia.

She mentioned simmering pomegranate juice until its volume was reduced by 1/2 (which would make it sweeter), so we figured that in order to get the same sweetness we'd need double the POM juice.

Later we may try making our own stevia based grenadine based on Cheryl's post and see if the drink is any better.

**note:
We also used Glass Vodka in ours, a "gluten-free" vodka.  Technically all vodkas are gluten-free due to the distilling process, however, some of our friends with Celiac disease and/or gluten intolerance have told us that they still get an allergic reaction when drinking vodkas distilled from wheat (which is most of them).  So we've started trying different vodka's derived from other sources.