We are Juicers!

Typical juicing ingredients: kale, apple, beet, strawberries, carrots, and orange.

We kept hearing about juicing from multiple fronts, typically our more health-conscious friends. After we visited back home, Chicago, and went over to Jim and Antonia's new house (where they had a juicer), we decided to start juicing. Jim and Antonia have a big Solo Star juicer. My mom also had a juicer, which she never used, so she let us try it out. It was a rotating style juicer where the juice comes out from centripetal forces after shredding up the fruits and veges first. We started making fruit juices every morning from apples, oranges, and strawberries. But I also wanted to make juice out of green veges like kale or cabbage. In order to do that, the juicer has to be of the grinding style, similar to a coffee grinder. But the juicer my mom let me borrow was the rotating kind. So I looked on craigslist after we got back to California to see what I could get.


Romy making juice in the morning.

California is no stranger to juicing, so I found so many choices on cragslist. The juicer we went with is called a Green Star, and it has a double auger, meaning it has two grinding blades, and two juice squeezing blades. The blades aren't like knife blades. They aren't sharp. Instead of chopping or shredding the fruits and veges, which creates a lot of heat, they grind it up into a mush. Then the mush goes into a squeezing section where all the juice gets squeezed out, and all the remaining pulp gets separated out. Because the grinding section, you can juice leafy veges like kale or wheat grass. You can even grind nuts to make nut butters, or grains to make flours. The juices are soooo good and very healthy because you can mix in some kale (which is very nutritionally dense) into sweeter fruits like mangos, strawberries, and apples. We also put beets into our juices.


Making banana ice cream from the juicer.

Since we've started juicing, we also found other recipes that can be made in the juicer. For example, we made fresh green pasta with the pasta attachment. Its so simple and very good. All you do is mix flour, water and egg (we made a gluten-free pasta by making it with brown rice flour). Then you juice up some kale or spinach to get the dark green juice. Add the kale juice instead of the water that is called for in the pasta recipe. Then you put all of the pasta dough into the juicer and it will push it out in spaghetti or whatever form you choose. The pasta is green, or you can make red pasta by juicing some beets instead. We also make banana ice cream a lot. Also very simple, all you do is peel some bananas, and put them in the freezer until they are fully frozen. Then you just shove them into the juicer and it grinds it up into a soft-serve ice cream consistency. There is no other ingredient besides banana, but it tastes so rich and creamy. Then we added some 'unhealthy' toppings such as chocolate.


Banana ice cream and all of the toppings.

We love our juicer and use it everyday! We've made quite a few juices, but our absolute favorite recipe is a strawberry-beet mix. Here is the list of ingredients:

1 medium beet, peeled
1 orange
1/2 lb strawberries
1 apple
4 large carrots
1/2 bunch kale


We found that juicing the apples, oranges and strawberries first was the best. Then follow by juicing the kale. Finish by juicing the beets and carrots. The juice is a rich red color and tastes so yummy!