Sunday, March 27, 2011

And Then They Bought a Juicer

Last weekend we bought a juicer. It's one of those things that I've been wanting for years. As I'm trying to find ways to cram in more servings of fruits and vegetables in my day, I've been buying more fresh juice. I've also been really interested in making some juices with greens added to them. I can't really find anything like that locally so our answer was to suck it up and go buy a juicer.

CarrotBeetAppleGingerJuice


This thing is awesome! The first juice we made was an apple-carrot-beet-ginger juice. We had no idea how much juice would come out of the produce so we actually ended up with about 5 huge glasses of juice. I know it's best not to refrigerate the juice and drink it later, but that's what we had to do with most of it. So crazy. I'm still getting the hang of how much fruit and veggies to put in to get just one or two glasses of juice.

So far we've made the apple-carrot-beet-ginger juice quite a few times, once with some kale added even. We've made lemon juice, apple juice, orange juice and pear juice, too. It's amazing. We realized that we'll never have to buy store-bought lemon juice again. That's something we use quite a bit at our place, too. The pears actually ended up making a bit of a pear puree. We cut it with some apple juice, simmered it all with a couple of cinnamon sticks and had the most amazing hot pear cider. Yum! I froze a bunch of the pear juice to use later. I think I might make a raw pie with that as the top layer.

CarrotBeetAppleGingerJuice
Phoebe was posing, too so I thought I'd get a photo of her as well as the juice.

If you've never had freshly juiced oranges, woah. Putting an orange through a juicer is much, much different than just squeezing all of the juice out of it. The juice is really foamy and so delicious. I like it so much better this way than out of a carton from the store.

We've been juicing pretty much every day now. I'm looking forward to trying some green juices. We've gotten a couple of recommendations from friends and I'm reading Crazy Sexy Diet right now and I think Kris Carr has a few recipes for them as well.

7 comments:

  1. oh boy, watch out! Juicing is addictive!! Can't wait to see all you do with it.
    Blessings, Debra
    Raw Vegan Diet

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  2. I've been wanting to buy one for several years too, but I can't decide which one. Which one did you get? I'm always confused at the number of Watts it should have and the different brands...

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  3. I hear ya, Camila. I felt the same way. We ended up getting a recommendation from a friend to buy a Breville. Those are supposed to be really good juicers. We bought the Breville Dual Disc juicer. That one has a disc for juicing and a puree disc that you can use for soft fruits like strawberries and melons and soft pears. I think the mouth is a bit wider on this one, too so you don't have to cut most of the stuff you want to juice. We have some friends that have the Breville Juice Fountain Elite and they like it alot, too. It just doesn't have the puree disc.

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  4. Thank you! They don't sell Breville where I live, but from what I can see the more Watts the better, and the wide mouth is also a plus to look for. I hope this year I save enough to buy one, because I always drink my vegetable juices made in the blender and they can be quite awful, since it ends up with chunks and a very thick texture.=S

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  5. Drinking anything with chunks doesn't sound all that appetizing, I have to say.

    This is just a guess, but I'm thinking that a juicer with a higher wattage is able to spin a bit faster. I know that the faster spinning (accompanied with a good blade, of course) will get more juice out of less produce. It's amazing how much juice we can get out of just a few pieces of fruit or veggies. Unfortunately, the better juicers tend to be much more expensive, but if it's something you'll use regularly, it ends up being worth it, in my opinion.

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  6. Can you post a recipe for the juice in the pictues? pleeeeeeeeeease?

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  7. Sure thing! For this particular juice, for one large glass of juice, use one beet, 3 carrots, 1 apple (I used a pink lady), and a little chunk of ginger.

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