Two nights ago I watched Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, and I had a lot of feelings about micronutrients and putting an end to being the unhealthy mess I’ve become. I texted a friend back home to make her vow to do a long distance juice supplement with me, then almost cried because I’m unemployed/broke/didn’t get the juicer in the breakup.
But I do have a blender! After some Googling I decided to try blending my way to fresh, green juice.
You guys, I could hardly fall asleep that night. I woke up the next morning, made a huge mess and ended up with a glass of green juice that I coaxed out of the blended bits with a metal sieve and a dish towel. Feeling juiced up and ready to go I headed out to get more fresh ingredients.
I picked up a steamer cloth at the local Asian market, since they were out of cheese cloth. Apparently folks online have had great results with nut milk bags, but for now this works swell. I gathered extra ingredients from the garden this morning and attempted round two, with much success. If I can do it, then you can, too. I believe in you!
Ingredients:
3-4 stalks of kale, leaves removed from the stalks (or not!)
one large cucumber
1-2 stalks of celery (not pictured, I didn’t want to be judged for my elderly celery)
2 medium carrots
1 granny smith apple
1 golden delicious apple
half a thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled with a spoon
juice of one lemon
1/2-1 cup water
Hardware:
blender/that thing that usually makes frozen margaritas
large bowl
fine mesh sieve
cheese cloth/steamer cloth/nut milk bag/dish towel
1. Wash your hands! You’re gonna be all up in the finished product, so scrub well.
2. Chop your cleaned vegetables and fruit into manageable pieces. Be nice to your blender, especially if it was a $5 yard sale find — it shouldn’t have to do all the work, just the part you can’t do on your own.
3. Once everything is in suitable chunks, think strategically about placement. What works well for me is celery on the bottom (so the strings achieve maximum obliteration), then kale and then some cucumber.
4. At this point I add water and start to blend to get things moving along. You might have to push down on everything to coax it into the blades, but please remember to stop the blender first. I have ingested countless bits of wooden spoon over the years and I’m still alive, but you’re smarter than I am.
5. After the magic starts to happen I add the lemon juice, ginger and remaining ingredients gradually. By the end of this juicing session my blender almost was overflowing, so start slow until you find out how much yours will hold.
Next comes the hands-on part!
6. Place your cloth into the sieve, overlapping the edges, and then put the whole thing over the bowl. Slowly pour the mixture into the cloth. You might want to wear one of your older, darker v-necks for this endeavor, since my nice new white one now has splashy green polka dots around my middle. Again, be smarter than me.
7. Once you’ve filled the cloth/sieve combo, gather up the sides and slowly squeeze. Add more of the contents from the blender and repeat. Keep squeezing and twisting until what’s left in the bag looks like, well, the photo below.
8. Give the contents of the bowl a stir and carefully pour yourself a nice glass of juice. Take a sip and then ruminate on all the flavors and healthy micronutrients while you wash the blender. Seriously, do it now, because if you sit down to drink your juice you might end up on tumblr and then it’ll be three hours later and you’ll come back to a crusty, hard-to-clean blender. Give it a rinse first and then go tumbling. Don’t forget to refrigerate your extra juice for later!
You did it! Do you feel healthier already? Once you have the basics down go wild. Hate kale but love spinach? The world of juicing is your veggie playground! Tomorrow I’m going to change it up and add beets.
What flavors do you think will go well together? Do you already juice, or did you see Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and have some feelings to share?
Be careful with beats! They stain everything… everything, but it tastes great. My girlfriend and I started juicing last month after watching the same doc and now she and I can’t go back. It feels so good drinking your food and noticing the changes your body has to junk after you have been juicing for a while. Her acne has cleared up and I’m slowly losing weight. When you drink healthy foods you crave eating healthy foods, too. Sometimes we’ll crave and give in to take-out Mexican food and regret it the next day. Juicing is a revelation and a revolution for your body. The movie’s website is a great resource as well if you interested in juicing and becoming a healthier you!
I would love to juice, but I usually just make green smoothies instead, because they’re juice without the fiber taken away.
With my crappy blender, it usually goes like this:
Some frozen mango, peach or pineapple
A banana
Several handfuls of baby spinach (to fill up the rest of the blender)
Water
Blend, stir more, blend more, add more water, yell at blender, hope it doesn’t start smoking, wonder how I could have lost the blender’s lid, consider buying new blender, stir more, blend more, drink.
When I am in the vicinity of a better blender (VITAMIX), it is more like this:
Frozen peach, mango or pineapple
Banana
Kale
Celery
Beets
Ginger
Cucumber
Carrots
ALL THE VEGETABLES EVERYTHING WILL BLEND
Some water
Blend, rejoice, think about how I should get married so I can register for a Vitamix, remember that it’s still not legal in my state.
Yeah when I read the title for this I was like: “Like green smoothies with no pulp? What’s the point of that? The pulp is the delicious/nutritiousness?”
Also? OMG VITAMIX I WANT TO GO TO THERE. The trick with a crappy blender is to let it blend FOREVER.
Seriously, I often blend my smoothies until the motor overheats (~3 minutes) and stops itself automatically, let it cool, and then blend for a few more minutes after that. I am not exaggerating, you can’t over blend smoothies imo.
Oh and no offense to juicing though! I know some people really cannot stand smoothies; my gf is one of those people. It was her smoothie intollerence that led to aforementioned blending method.
I looove juicing! I do it just about every day. Try this:
pineapple with skin
oranges
strawberries
ginger
I add fiber to most of my drinks. I have the breville dual disc
http://www.brevilleusa.com/juicing/dual-disc-juice-processor.html, I want that Vitamix.
I am proud to say I got the juicer in the breakup but joke’s on me cause I don’t have a dishwasher and that sieve part is a bitch to clean. Anyway.
1-2 oranges
2-3 apples
as many carrots as i can do without
1 beet
so freakin delicious.
I keep my juice pulp and make cookie/cracker things out of them! I have two mason jars in my fridge where I keep the pulp (one from sweet juices and one from savory veg juices) until I have enough for a batch. To make the cookies I use a bunch of ground flax seed + seasonings or whatever else I feel like adding (nuts and shredded coconut for the fruity ones!). Then I bake them. If you google “juice pulp crackers” you can find some recipes.
I hate the idea of throwing away all of that fiber so I love doing this because there is no longer any waste and its a nice and healthy snack!
That’s brilliant! I can totally justify juicing if I do this, I just hate the idea of removing the fiber from my produce and throwing it away.
T, I’m working my way up to mason jars of pulp in the fridge. I have to ease my housemate into this, I think. Thanks for the google suggestion!
It really only takes maybe 2 big juices to make enough pulp for a batch of these things. Depending on how often you juice….the mason jars don’t have to be in the fridge for long! (I don’t think I’d want to leave them in there for too long anyways for food safety reasons)
So I did a double batch of juice today and then baked what I’m dubbing cookins (cookie-muffins…muffies?) using the pulp and an adapted recipe for zucchini bread. Self-tested, housemate-approved. It feels a bit de/re/constructionist, and I love it.
Awesome!
Yes! That pulp is also great for putting into things like carrot or zuchinni breads, or if it’s more savory, mixing into tomato sauces or ricotta mixtures.
this is great! usually i just mix the pulp (beats or carrot) in my dogs food because he loooooves it, but now i think i’ll make some food out of it.
I’m glad everybody is digging the suggestion!
Also I just bought my juicer this year…and I did a ton of research on the best kind to get….because a juicer is seriously an investment. You guys! There are SO many options! Masticating types (more expensive, bigger, and harder to clean/operate) are better than centrifugal types because they don’t destroy the nutrients of the juices so you could make a big batch and drink it throughout the day or whatevs. If you have the centrifugal types (cheaper, smaller and easier to clean/operate) you have to drink immediately. You HAVE to. This is becoming my own article, so I’m not going to get into any more detail on that.
So in conclusion, the one I got is kind of a “hybrid.” It masticates but its a bit cheaper and easy to clean/use. Seriously once everything is chopped/cleaned, it only takes me like 5 minutes (10 MAX) to juice + clean up. Plus it doesn’t take over my counter with massive bulk. I got mine from BBB with the 20% off coupon (FTW). Split the cost with your gf/roommate/etc and it hurts so much less. I got the Omega VRT350 in case you want to know.
discountjuicers.com is a really good site that compares and contrasts different juicers with youtube videos and everything!
Also I swear I don’t work for any of these places. I am just enthusiastic about researching things and sharing my findings!
Also also this article is a great intro into making juice when you don’t want to make the huge jump (FINANCIAL INVESTMENT) into straight up juicing. So glad you posted this! :)
Careful juicing spinach guys..spinach also contains oxalic acid – a substance that inhibits the absorption of calcium into the body. So its best to juice other green leafy veggies..They all have the same amount of iron, if not more than spinach.
i use a paint strainer bag from Home Deopot ($1) instead of an 18$ nut milk bag. Works really well, and saves you money to buy more veggies to juice.
hmmm I should really get into this.
yeah, i had no idea i’m apparently the only lesbian on earth who doesn’t do this and now i feel really embarrassed
I promise you aren’t the only one, but we’re one of a small percentage.
Rachel, if we lived close to each other I’d bring you some juice/convert you to one who juices. Instead of a toaster oven, would I get a juicer?
i watched Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead a few months ago and also had a lot of feelings about doing a (short) juice fast and ending my unhealthy ways. i went so far as researching recipes and juicer options. then i quickly realized that i have a)no money and b)no space in my tiny kitchen for a juicer. i’m definitely giving this method a try.
also re: Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, i kept wondering if he was trying to tell me a story or sell me something.
damn. my roommate and i had a long talk about how much we missed fresh produce yesterday. it was sad and torturous.
Quote from paid programming about a juicer “People kept coming up to me and asking if I was pregnant, because of my glow. Hello people, I’m not pregnant, I’m juicing!”
I bet you are, hooo ho.
The very first words I spoke this morning were “Ich trinke gern Saft” (“I like to drink juice”). True story.
great article! wish we cpu;d juice together here in the valley of the sun! :)
*could
I love juicing and making smoothies, but my blender/juicer is a serious monster and it’s such a hassle to clean, it’s hardly worth it.
If only I had a smaller one that I could keep on the bench and use every morning!
This article is great.
“You might want to wear one of your older, darker v-necks for this endeavor” Ugh thank you I was just gonna do this in my newer, lighter v-neck. How did you know Steph how did you know?
Learn from my (daily) mistakes. Seriously, I worked in a bakery and still I make crap from flour while wearing my dark v-necks. I’m a catch, I tell ya.
I work on an organic farm, so I’m lucky to have organic veggies abundantly available. Usually after a carrot harvest another intern and I will take a bunch of reject carrots (the ones too gnarly to sell) and juice them on our lunch break. Then we take all of the pulp and mix it with some wheat flour, baking powder, an egg or two, flax seed, brown sugar, and whatever else we have around and bake it for about 45 minutes for a delicious post-work snack.
we’re also smoothie fiends – he has a magic bullet and I have a small blender (similar to a magic bullet but not as expensive) and we get local yogurt and blend up veggies & frozen fruit from the farm, it’s pretty great. I’m definitely going to try blender juice, the blender is so much easier to clean than the juicer.
This makes me so thankful that I finally get to take my juicer out of storage in only a week and a half. I miss green juices more than anything.
My base recipe (to taste):
3+ stalks Kale
1-2 PINK LADY apples (you guys, it’s alllll about the pink ladies.)
1-2 lemons (rind & pith removed- so bitter!)
Personally, this is all I really need because it tastes like heaven, but it’s also my base for when i’m feeling adventurous and add a carrot, or beets, and/or a million other leafy greens because leafy greens are THE BEST.
I’m campaigning/saving/praying for a Vitamix though, and I will sell the shit out of my juicer when I’ve accomplished that major life goal. They do absolutely EVERYTHING.
i feel like i am missing something. why not just eat the fruits/veggies if you’re worried about getting enough vitamins?