I'm Juicing

I’m not on steroids, but recently I am putting lots of healthy juice into my body.  Hubby and I watched a documentary/movie the other weekend on Netflix, “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” where an Australian man named Joe travels around the US for 60 days while on a juice cleanse.  For two months straight he eats no solid foods, only juice for every meal which he makes from an electric juicer in the back of his car.  The juice cleanse involves eating drinking all your daily calories from green vegetables and some fruits, harnessing the power of micro-nutrients in the juice.  I don’t want to give the whole movie away, because I think it’s is worth watching, but I’ll say that Joe’s story was powerful and he was able to motivate many other people. 

Although I didn’t want to do a strict cleanse or anything, I was reminded of a juicer I recently bought at a garage sale.  I loosely followed one of Joe’s recipes for “Mean Green” Juice.  His recipe includes: green apples, kale, lemon, ginger, cucumbers and celery.  I had no celery, so I added some carrots and collard greens.  I found this is going to be a great way to use up some cucumbers from our garden!  The little ones for pickles, the big ones for juicing.  I made a great big mess, but finally I had some odd colored juice.

It was ok.  Surprisingly it tasted like…..vegetables….not horrible, just not amazingly refreshing.

I had bought some Naked Green juice at a store the other day and noticed that it had blended fruit in it in addition to all the veggies, so I got out the blender and whipped up a banana, nectarine and kiwi because that is what I had.  Mango and pineapple would be really good too.  The fruit was much thicker than the juice, more like a smoothie, but when I mixed equal parts veggies and fruit, it tasted pretty good!  Even hubby liked it, and he doesn’t like raw veggies.  I have read that you shouldn’t mix fruits and vegetables because they need different enzymes to be broken down in the stomach and you could give yourself a stomachache..I’m not a doctor, so I’m going to try to stick to mostly vegetables as I get used to them.  Also, fruit juices are high in sugar (although natural sugar) so I don’t want to overdo it. 

The fun thing now is experimenting with different veggies/fruit.  I know the collard greens are out, they are too bitter and plastic-y, spinach is much better in my opinion.  Anyone out there seen the movie or like to juice? I’d love to hear some good recipes. 

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