Juicing website!

I found this great resource this morning!  Great for figuring out the nutritional content of your juice recipes, even the ones you make up :o).  Great find!  Happy juicing!

fav drink with a peachy tweak

It's only fitting to welcome September, the unofficial mark of summer's end, with one last peach juice.  With it being the season for peaches, this became my go to drink of the summer.  It's another simple variation of my favorite carrot juice:
3 carrots
2 peaches
ginger root

Goodbye summer!  Hello fall!

Morning green glory

Yesterday I made the Morning Green Glory juice.  A lot of green juices have very similar ingredients so they all taste pretty similar to me.  This one has a nice hint of sweet and sour.  Pretty light, pretty good, packed with nutrients (thinking back I may have forgotten the spinach).  The recipe yields about two glasses.

Redo: Spiced Peach Pear Juice

I gave the Spiced Peach Pear Juice another shot today now that peaches are in season.  And I remembered to add the spices (including the $5 clove powder lol).

Very very good.  Not as sweet as the nectarines and not as sweet as I would have thought.  It's refreshing.  Perfect for a pleasant Saturday :o).

Splash of Sun!!

Saw this simple recipe the other day.  Does it look familiar?  It should!  It's my favorite recipe minus two apples, plus two oranges.

I didn't like it as much as I thought I would :o(.  It's beautiful and packed with nutrients, but it just wasn't sweet enough to me, even though I added an extra orange.  Maybe clementines would have been better, but I still like the apple recipe the most.

I do have some tips for juicing oranges as I experimented a lot today.  I remember reading that you should juice citrus cold.  I remembered this after juicing an orange that was room temperature and thinking that it didn't yield very much liquid.  In my head it makes sense that a cold orange would juice better.  The juicer does not like mushy foods.  The second orange I juiced was refrigerated.  Refrigerated oranges are hard to peel.  Unless you cut them into quarters first :o).  This is also a good way to peel room temp oranges without making a complete mess.  Happy juicing!

Green Lemonade

Desiring juice today, so I thought I'd try the Green Lemonade.  I was a bit skeptical about it, as the ingredients were similar to the Mean Green juice, which I did not like (I will be making it again soon to confirm.  It's Joe's favorite so I'm sure I just need to give it another shot).  A friend of mine made lemonade this morning and that sounded good, so I was hoping the lemon part would save the day.

It did!  It's not sweet but I like it :o).  It has a nice clear consistency and the greens are prevalent but not overpowering; just enough to still taste the lemon.  I looked back at the Mean Green juice.  This recipe only adds spinach and subtracts ginger, half a cucumber, and an apple, so not quite sure how I'm enjoying it more.  I'll admit my apple was ginormous so maybe that's the difference.  Anyway this was "good."  Nice and clean.  Will have this one again.

Spiced Peach Pear Juice

I saw this recipe on facebook the other day and just thought it looked heavenly!  I picked up the ingredients on my grocery run yesterday.  Unfortunately I couldn't find peaches so I substituted nectarines.  And I opted to skip the clove powder as it was almost $5 a jar!  Good thing because as I started typing this I realized I forgot to add all the spices lol.  Anyway this one is pretty good.  It tastes a lot like my favorite carrot juice recipe, but sweeter.  I'm sure the spices add a nice touch so I'll have to remember to throw those in next time.

juice casserole

So I decided to cook red beans and rice for dinner.  I made it last week but halved the recipe so I still had half an onion, half a bell pepper etc. so I wanted to use up the ingredients before they went to waste.  Well this prompted a desire to use up some other leftover veggies I had so I decided to go ahead and juice them.  Isn't the joke that casserole is just leftover everything mixed together?  Well I guess I made juice casserole.

I had some very wilted celery, soft blackberries, about 4 clementines, half a lemon, parsley, swiss chard, and some tomatoes.  You will recognize all of these things from the 3 day reboot list.  The 3 day reboot that I did over 2 weeks ago...  Yeah.  I decided the tomatoes would be a bit much but I put everything else through the juicer and hoped for the best.  Again, worst that could happen is it's terrible and I throw it away which is what would definitely happen if I left the veggies whole.

While it wasn't the prettiest thing to look at, it wasn't too bad lol.  Better than the potato juice lol.  I put it in a small glass just in case, but I have drank most of the pitcher it yielded (again I juiced the pulp- there was a LOT of soggy pulp).  It mostly tasted like celery (I did have a lot of wilted celery), but the oranges and blackberries maybe (?) gave it some sweetness that made it decent.  It was definitely a green juice like the one I had on day 1 of the reboot, but I probably enjoyed it more since 1) there was less of it, 2) I had other food on my palate, and 3) the veggies were old so the taste of the greens wasn't as strong.

Operation don't throw out any food: #success!!

Orange juice

This morning I made orange juice :o).  I had quite a few clementines left from the other weekend so I figured I'd use them before they went to waste (recall that this is how I envisioned myself using the juicer lol).  I peeled five oranges and pushed them through.  It made about 2 tablespoons (an exaggeration but still).  So I put 7 more through.  I had a decent amount of juice but the pulp seemed pretty heavy/wet, so though I said I wouldn't I had an idea about how to juice the pulp and get more juice out in a a clean way.  Juicing the pulp makes a mess because if you turn the juicer on and then dump in the pulp, the spinning basket shoots the pulp out of the juicer toward the ceiling.  Now the reason you are not supposed to put food in the juicer before turning it on is because the juicer can get "stuck" or jammed with the food.  So since the pulp is already soft I figured maybe this wouldn't be the case if I put it back through.  I poured the pulp into the chute, put the food pusher in place, and turned it on.  I got out a fair amount of additional juice (worth the extra effort) and no mess!

The juice was much sweeter than I expected, I guess because orange juice from the store probably isn't made with clementines.  But it was good; super fresh and no preservatives :o).  I don't think it has any pulp at all, but it's a little foamy at the top so I drank it using a straw.  I'm finding straws are a good thing for juicers (my neighbor uses a little mesh basket to filter out pulp and foam).

Juice Recipe Reviews III

The "sunset blend juice" was the scariest for me to try.  The ingredients just did not sound appealing to me.  At all.  (A sweet potato?? Beets???  Gross!)  But I had already bought all the ingredients, the potato was looking a little sad, the red bell pepper was looking a lot sad, so I figured better to make the juice, hate it and throw it out than just throw out the ingredients off top.

It actually is not all that bad.  Notice I didn't say it was good lol.  It's very pretty to me.  Has a nice rich color (nutrients).  It's sweet.  There is a funny taste that I don't really like.  At first I thought it was the beets.  Now I think it may be the bell pepper.  I was surprised at the amount of juice that came out of the potato.  I read that you should not put any potato through the juicer except a sweet potato.  Maybe they are just juicier.  Anyway, I'm satisfied.  The recipe yielded about 2 glasses of juice.  I think I can handle one tonight (I have a lot of better smelling/tasting things cooking in this kitchen right now), and I may just pour the other glass for tomorrow (it will probably get thrown out just being real).

Anyway, first juice in a week.  Might try this one again without the red bell pepper.  Probably not though lol.

UPDATE: I actually finished this juice today (three days later) lol.  It got better each day as the flavors mellowed out (which was prob just the nutrients escaping from the glass into the universe ha ha).  Anyway, not bad.  May make it again one day far far in the distance.

Juice recipe reviews II

I decided to start with the breakfast drink of day 2 today.  It had grapes, blackberries, apple, and what I think is waaaaaaaay too much ginger.  The recipe called for 2 2x2" pieces.  I knew from yesterday that that was probably too much but as I've said I like to follow recipes exactly, especially if it's a new recipe.  Anyway I was right, too much ginger, but good besides that.  I haven't been pouring the juices over ice, but this one I did to dilute the ginger a bit.  I think it's also very sweet, so the ice helps that too.  I would make this one again using just an inch of the ginger root.

The gazpacho juice was actually pretty good.  I packed it to go and drank it down in a hurry without issue.  I think it was refreshing not to have ginger lol.  It wasn't sweet at all, the first drink without apple.  I've never had gazpacho so I'm not sure if it lives up to expectations but it was easy to make and pretty good.  I did get pretty self conscious about my breath because of the red onion.  Maybe the parsley canceled it out but I wouldn't drink this one before a hot date lol.Will probably try this one again (or some variant).

Juice recipe reviews I

So my awesome neighbor bought me a book on juicing with tons of recipes so I will be trying a lot of miscellaneous combinations after this weekend.  For now I am trying to exactly follow what's listed in the 3 day reboot.  This morning I really enjoyed the carrot/apple/ginger concoction.  It was a nearly perfect yield amount (a little over one glass) and was a surprisingly complex taste (in a good way) despite few ingredients.  That one is the first one added to my repertoire.

The Mean Green juice however...  First of all it yielded nearly an entire pitcher.  My cucumber and apples were admittedly large but goodness!  The ginger gives it a nice kick but it needs to be a bit sweeter.  And this is coming from a person who doesn't like sweet drinks.  I don't like sugar in my alcohol (I drink vodka with water) and I rarely drink soda at all.  But this... this is a bit much.  I thought I would really like it but it tastes like grass.  Grass with ginger lol.  It's going to take me an hour just to finish it.  I'll try this one again with larger apples and a smaller cucumber/celery stalk but first impression is not impressed.  It might be good if there was something else on my palate.