homemade juices

Whenever my husband, Mr. E, stays home from work, I am always interested to find out what brilliant idea he has come up with while I'm gone.  Last week, he did not disappoint me.  I came into the living room and found him researching juicers.  He took one look at my raised eyebrows and launched into the following explanation.  "I watched a documentary today, about an obese man who went on an all-juice diet.  The guy lost tons of weight, and all of his health issues disappeared as well.  Then he got another obese man to go on the all-juice diet too, and the same thing happened.  I think we should get a juicer."  I told him, "No.  We do not need a juicer. 1) We're not overweight, 2) we exercise regularly, 3) we eat healthfully; we're even vegetarians (except I can't seem to give up buffalo chicken), and 4) there is no way I'm going on a liquid diet.  We're not getting a juicer and that's final."

Later that week, a juicer arrived in the mail.  Mr. E suggested we do a "3-day cleanse" over the holiday weekend.  I reminded him that we live in a one bedroom, and more importantly, one bathroom, apartment.  The scene from Bridesmaids was swirling around in my mind.

We did not do a 3-day cleanse over the holiday weekend.  Thank God.  But we did try some juices, and they came out really good!  

Mr. E found that if you line the food catcher (container on the left) with a plastic grocery bag, it makes for easy clean up.  Tilting the container will also help to keep the bag from being sucked into the middle compartment.

So far, we have tried three juices.

1) carrot, cucumber, banana, lemon - Mr. E discovered that bananas don't have a lot of juice

2) orange, pear, blueberry, strawberry - this was an obvious success

3) orange, pineapple, strawberry, carrot - this one was the best and is shown below.

I have not included any recipes with this because we did not follow any.  The juicer did come with a small booklet of recipes, and we look at them for ideas, but mostly we just throw in any fruits or vegetables that we have lying around the kitchen.  The key is to experiment.  My next step will be to try this on my nephews...one in particular who's vegetable of choice is ketchup.  I'll keep you posted.