Wednesday, July 14, 2010

I Love Juice

I love juice. 


 According to google images, this guy does too...  :s


What I don't love is paying $7+ for a plastic cup full of questionably fresh and/or clean fruit and vege, from a surly teenager with a hangover. Luckily, I no longer have to. Let me introduce you to my second-favourite kitchen appliance... my juicer!

I acquired (read: borrowed and never returned) my Breville juicer from my mum when I moved out of home. It has periods of intense use, followed by downtime, but it is worth ever dollar I didn't spend on it. Juicing is quick and easy, a great way to get a good dose of fruit and veges into you (remember, juice only counts as one of your five plus a day serves though), and juicers make the best, most potent lemon, ginger, honey drinks you will ever try. It's also a great way to use up any produce you have fading in your fridge before your next trip to the farmers market.

I don't have a favourite recipe really. I juice most things, and am generally happy with the result. Basic juicing guidelines recommend not to mix veges with fruit other than apples, but other than that I don't follow any rules (yeah, I'm a juicing bad ass). Today's juice consisted of green apples, kale and lemon. It's tart enough to make your sour muscle tweak a wee bit (you know, that one under your chin), but still pleasantly refreshing. It would be better with fresh ginger and a beetroot, but I'm not going to complain.

Step one

Step two

Step three

I often hear people complain about the post-juicing clean-up. To be honest, I don't really find it a problem. A quick rinse in hot water gets off the pulpy bits, and until I start whipping chicken breasts through my juicer, that will be the extent of the clean-up routine. Another juicing bonus is the wormies in my worm farm just love the excess pulp. If you use citrus, just pour a bit of hot water over the pulp and let it cool before you feed it to the hungry wee fellas.

Worm food

Juicers not liberated from your mum's pantry are a bit expensive, but there is always Trademe, or if you have something like Flybuys, you could probably find a good deal through them. An unofficial survey tells me that a lot of people have an unused and unloved juicer hiding in the depths of their kitchen anyway, so offer to take it off their hands. If you are a regular juice buyer, it doesn't take long to make back any investment from those $7 cups. And your day will be brighter from not having to deal with the surly teenager too.

Now if only I had one of these to drink my juice through...

4 comments:

  1. That bodybuilder truly is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. I'm more of a smoothie girl myself, I think juice may have been ruined for me forever when I did a juice detox several years ago. It was hideous.

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  2. Isn't he awful? I'm pretty sure he loves more than just juice...
    Oh I love smoothies as well. My fav lately has been frozen banana, blueberries, the most amazing organic yoghurt and milk, with chia and flax seeds. Mmmm I'm getting hungry just thinking about it, despite just having finished a huge feed of homemade sushi!
    xx

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  3. I love juice too. Nothing quite as nice. I used to have a juicer but I found I wasted too much of the pulp of the fruit. We now use our blender and use the juice of an orange or grapefruit as the base and just throw in frozen bits of other fruits (or veges) such as berries, apple, carrot, kiwi...soooo yum!

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  4. Mmmm LJ, that sounds good too. Like a pure fruit smoothie! It does waste quite a bit of pulp though, I agree. Some people make raw crackers out of their vege juice pulp so they may be worth a try one day?...

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