New Year’s Hangover Cure Cocktail

Nancy Lopez McHugh has a slightly strange, but effective way to cure that New Year’s hangover.
By Nancy Lopez-McHugh

New Years Eve is here and you know what that means, party time! It’s the last night of the year to let loose, have fun, really enjoy yourself and get the new year off to a great new start. It’s the next morning, the first morning of the new year, that many of us will be hungover and saying I will never drink that much again. OK, we all say that and then we go doing it again and we conveniently forget the horrible hangover that will need  nursing the next day.

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There are several things you can do to prevent a hangover from starting. Besides the obvious of not over drinking your limit, the first and most important thing is staying hydrated. My husband taught me this trick and it always works, you just have to make sure you follow it. Drink equal amounts of water for every alcoholic drink you put in your body. So you drink 1 glass of red wine, drink 1 large glass of water and so on. Water will flush the alcohol out of your body faster and help it stay hydrated which is the most important thing for your body. The next thing is food. If you have a hearty amount of food in your stomach, I’m not talking about a salad, you will feel better and you shouldn’t get sick. Well, unless you over do it with the alcohol and of course that will make you sick to your stomach whether you have a hearty meal or a salad in your stomach.

If you wake up on January 1st and you are horribly hungover, you know that throbbing, pounding headache, sour stomach, lethargic feeling there are some things you can do to feel better. Again drinking lots of water and getting food into your stomach will help  you feel better, so start with that. Take some aspirin only after you’ve had food because it can irritate your stomach more. The next trick again comes from my husband.

One afternoon, feeling horrible from a night of drinking, he was having lunch with a Ukrainian friend.  She noticed his hangover and suggested that he try a special Ukrainian “cocktail” to treat his hangover. The waiter brought out a beautiful flute glass filled to the rim with a yellowish-green liquid. At first he hesitated to drink it because he was informed that it was pickle juice. Pickle juice? Huh? Like from a jar of gherkin or dill pickles? Yup! He chugged it down as fast as he could, desperately trying not to spit it out. You can imagine getting a whole glass of pickle juice to go down can be hard, not to mention the sour puckering that will leave your face looking like it’s being sucked in from somewhere inside your head, while your lips look like they are being sucked out by an invisible vacuum. Within a few minutes his sour upset stomach was gone, completely back to normal. He couldn’t believe that a sour glass of pickle juice had made him instantly feel better. After eating some hearty food and drinking a lot of water he felt so much better.

All you do is pour the pickle juice into a glass and drink. Make it pretty by adding a slice of pickle for decoration. (I’ve used my homemade dill pickles for these photos but commercial will work just fine.) You could also add  how some ice cubes. It’s all about the presentation, well whatever helps trick your mind into drinking it. While it may not be the most delicious tasting drink in the world, OK it’s kinda gross just picturing it going down your throat, this does work. So if you find yourself in a hungover state and you try this special pickle juice cocktail let me know how you liked it and how it worked for you. *To clarify any confusion when I say pickles I mean dill pickles or cucumber pickles, though I don’t see why other types of sour pickled veggies wouldn’t also work.*