juicy stuff

Ha ha, got you there with the title, didn't I?!

When TS and I first moved in together last year, we got a couple of things for the house that neither of us were able to bring to the party - vacuum cleaner, etc - and we also got a juicer. At first we only used it every now and then, because it seemed to be a bit of a pain to clean. It was so much easier to open a bottle than it was to slice upteen bits of fruit, juice them, drink the juice, and then have to clean the darn thing!

As Jason Vale, the Juice Master, says in his book, the day they make juicers easy to clean is the day that everyone in the world will have a juicer :)

But this year, we decided to use our juicer more often. So, rather than buy fruit juice, we buy the fruit and juice it ourselves. We're saving about £5 on our grocery bill on average just by not buying juice anymore. Another incentive to keep up the juicing!

We've been playing around with various combinations - our standard juice tends to be carrot, apple, orange and ginger. But seeing that we've both had the flu this week (hence the silence here!) we've created a new combo with a few handfuls of spinach and parsley, and we had a old looking piece of broccoli in the fridge which we thought might work.....and surprisingly, it did!

Most health magazines and gurus tend to spout the wonders of fresh juicing these days, and to be honest I'd had a rather ambivalent attitude towards it - it just seemed like a lot of effort, and most times I'd rather eat the fruit than drink it. I didn't see what was wrong with bottled juice. Until I looked into it a bit more and realised that so many of the nutrients are lost in the bottling process. So, like most things in life, the fresher the better!

A few things have helped me use my juicer more often:

• Not buying juice from the supermarket, so if I want some I actually have to make it myself
• Having it either out on the worktop or within easy reaching distance
• Putting a plastic bag inside the chute for easy clean up (it really works!)
• Rinsing everything immediately once you've finished juicing - leaving the pulp and stray bits to stick to everything makes cleaning up a bit more of a pain!
  

We certainly don't do it every day - I'm just not up in time to do it! - but on the weekends we make a huge jug of it and delight in getting all our vitamins and minerals for the day in a glass. It's a nice treat to look forward to after my run too.


My favourite juice combos so far have been:

• Apple, carrot and ginger
• Carrot and orange
• Spinach, parsley, orange, apple, carrot and ginger
• Apple, then blended with no-fat greek yoghurt and 1 banana
• Apple, pineapple and orange
• Apple and lime (inspired by a juice I had in Victoria, Canada called "Dragonfly")
  

I am yet to try beetroot juice!! That will be next week's challenge.


Another nice thing from my kitchen recently:

"Fried" rice - I love my rice cooker! How did I get by without one of these for so long?! We usually cook enough to have some for the next day, and I made this one lazy Sunday night when we felt like something quick and easy. Chopped up a leek, some celery and one courgette (you can use whatever you have handy), stirfried them until soft, then I threw in the rice, the rest of a packet of frozen mixed vegetables (peas, carrot, corn and beans), two baby pak choi, threw in some sweet chilli, soy and oyster sauces, sauteed it until the vegies were cooked and the rice was heated through. In two other pans, I grilled some tofu chunks I had marinated in some sweet Japanese garlic soy in one; in the other, I made an omelette that was flavoured with soy, sweet chilli and fresh coriander. Chopped up the omelette into shreds once it was cooked through, and then added it and the tofu to the rice. Stirred everything through, and then served up! Easy, healthy (no oil used) and so delicious!

We've also just done the shop for the week. I do love seeing the fridge full of healthy, delicious things:

Did you notice on the top shelf that there's a mini Cherry Ripe?!

Yesterday TS and I had lunch at Yo! Sushi in Russell Square, seeing we not only had something to celebrate, but also a 40% voucher! Every Saturday, there is a delightful fresh food market in the Brunswick Centre - fresh pasta, a cupcake stall, cheeses, organic vegetables, french crepes, chorizo hotdogs - it's just lovely. But yesterday, after stumbling out of Yo! Sushi filled to the brim with miso soup and crispy tofu salad, the first stall I saw seemed to be selling.....Tim Tams? Surely not, I thought, as I wandered over. Yes, the owner of the stall was selling all sorts of things I used to see in Coles all the time - Barbecue Shapes, Cheezels, Chicken Twisties (can a vegetarian eat them I wonder?!), Tim Tams - in honour of Australia Day earlier in the week. Thankfully I was completely stuffed from lunch, so this helped restrain me! I just got one mini Cherry Ripe, and held it like a precious jewel.

It's now in the fridge, waiting to be savoured - perhaps chopped and stirred into some of my favourite coconut yoghurt, or eaten on it's own with a mug of hot chocolate. It was 50p, which is about $1.20 AUD! Bah!!

With the flu pretty much departed now, I'm hoping to be back on form this week with my running, which I'll talk a bit more about in my next post. My challenge for this week is also to eat more fruit. Well, with the juicer that shouldn't be too hard!

Hope you're keeping warm or cool, wherever you're reading from! :)


Juicy links

• Why Juice? from Rawfoods.com
• JuiceMaster.com