We decided to start experimenting with juicing. No, actually, that’s not how it happened really. A few days ago, we got hyped up after watching a documentary on Netflix about how processed foods are poisoning us all, and the benefits of natural foods. In the dramatization, natural food and juicing even helped a lady deal with her self-loathing in the face of the hot guy at work. Although Thom and I don’t have problems with hot guys at work, we have been somewhat on a health kick, working out consistently for the past few months and cooking a lot of fresh food. At any rate, the show put us over the edge, and we decided to start juicing.

  We actually had an old juicer from several years ago, so after buying a bunch of kale, parsley, and fruit, I got it out and cleaned it up. It actually turned out to be kind of a waste of time. I’m sure our juicer was not high end by any means, but it was unbelievably wasteful.  It produced a very small amount of juice for a very large amount of waste product. I tried to tell myself that maybe this was normal, but when I juiced a lemon and it only got about a quarter of the juice that a hand juiced lemon puts out, I called it quits.

Instead, I decided to just put everything in the blender and blend the living hell out of it. This has been working surprisingly well. I cut the “frilly” parts off of the kale, and use only the frills. There’s a bit of a technique to loading the blender, at least with ours (again, not a high end appliance – notice a trend here?). The trick is to put chunky items at the bottom and leafy items on top of them. If the leafy is on the bottom, the blades have trouble grabbing it, and it doesn’t create the suction that brings things down towards the blades. I also add a little bit of water to make up for the kale not being really juicy.

So far the winner has been the first juice I made: kale, pineapple, lime, pear, and mint (I grew the mint!).  Last night I did kale, celery, pineapple, and mango. It was drinkable but the celery was really dominant. Today I tried pear, nectarine, kale, parsley and a little carrot. It was pretty good, but a very light taste. The mint seems to go really well with kale actually, I’ll probably put it in more drinks in the future.