So today, after a week or more of talking about it, I finally started my juice fast. What exactly does that mean? Well, for a few days I'll be having juice for breakfast (apple with grape, primarily) and juice for lunch (carrot with tomato, primarily). For dinner? Real food!!! I'm not trying to starve myself to death. I just want to give my poor insides a break from all the high-fat, high-sugar, high-carb junk I've been eating. I also want to try to reset my mind and body so I don't crave all those things all the time. I was seriously thinking about fries and Snickers 24/7 (hubby and I even polished off an 8-pack of fun-size Snickers in about 5 minutes last night - we need help!) So, as you can see, I made a bunch of juice this morning - isn't the carrot pulp pretty?
I've had a couple of people ask me about our juicer. It's a Champion, as recommended by a co-worker of my husband's. His family eats a 90% raw-food diet (except for the one night a week they splurge) and they drink a LOT of juices. Fruit juices, veggie juices, green juices. And they are all SUPER healthy. So we thought we'd give it a try. Not the raw food, of course, but the juicing thing. Honestly, we don't make actual juice all that often. It takes an enormous amount of produce to yield anything more than a couple glasses of juice and tossing all that pulp (albeit onto our garden) still feels wasteful. Besides which we lose a lot of fiber that way. But here are a few things we do use our juicer for:
1) Making juice - Homemade apple-grape juice is just about the yummiest thing ever.
2) Making "ice cream" - run some bananas or frozen mixed fruit through the juicer and you have a super yummy frozen treat!
3) Making purees - our juicer comes with a 'blank' (ie a solid piece of plastic vs the juicing screen). When you run foods through with the 'blank' on, they come out nicely pureed. We've made everything from baby-food to apple sauce this way.
So far the only food we've found that our juicer can't take on is kale - it's thick stems get all tangled in the blade and bog it down. However, drinking kale tastes a lot like drinking freshly-cut lawn - so why bother? It's much better used it soups and stir-fries (or baked as chips!)
So that's our juicing experience in a nutshell. Wish me luck on my mini-fast - I'm hungry already!
Thats a shame it can't juice kale, I actually love juicing kale. Where did you buy your Champion? I've been watching e-bay for a good deal on one. Also how easy is it to clean and how dry is the pulp after juicing? I hears its one of the best but would love to hear your experience with it. :)
ReplyDeleteWe bought ours on Amazon I think. It could probably do Kale if we de-stemmed it first, we just didn't bother the one time we tried. We love ours. It's super easy to clean (although I recommend getting a bottle-brush) and the pulp is pretty dry. I can't imagine it could get much more juice out. Most of the pieces (except the blade) can go in the dishwasher, too.
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