Juice

Remember when your parent's wouldn't let you leave the table until you ate all your veggies?  Not to one-up you or anything, but I had to drink my veggies once in a while.  The thing you don't know is that I actually LOVED carrot juice!  I thought it was the most amazing, sweet, unfortunately staining drink I could want.

My mom got a Champion juicer when I was young.  Boy, was it versatile! It could turn fruits and veggies into juice, garbanzo (years later I found out these are also chickpeas) beans into hummus, and peanuts into peanut butter.

One of my cousins and brother remember an evening of juice sampling, though our moms don't seem to share the memory in quite the same way.  My brother and I thought we were going to play with our cousin.  As it turned out, we were also destined to be juice guinea pigs.  I do not remember specific combinations, but I am pretty sure about a third of the produce department was involved.  There were some that we could barely force down, but there were some that we kinda liked, just a little bit!


Time travel a few years into the future:


When I was in college, I decided to get a better grip on conscious eating.  I was pretty good, but who can't do better?  I decided that I needed a Champion juicer, just like my mom.  Part of this decision came after frying the motor on a blender trying to make hummus one day.  Ooops.  Guess garbanzo beans don't have quite enough liquid for a blender.

beets and cranberries

There are all kinds of theories about how the benefits of fruits and veggies are absorbed.  There are the raw foodist's that think that too many nutrients are lost in cooking, so they will not eat anything that has been cooked.  I am not making this up.  Then on the other end of the spectrum, there are people who pretty much only eat canned produce.  They just don't like the taste or texture of fresh produce.  This is harder for me to believe, but I have met a few in my life.

Top: carrot, lemon, ginger juice
Bottom: carrot, lemon, ginger pulp

When it comes to juicing, I was always a bit suspicious about the fiber end of things.  When juicing, you are basically separating the liquid from the solids.  Aren't the solids holding the fiber? what a waste right?  The more I thought about it, it's not.  There are tons of nutrients in the juice still, and I am not substituting juice for all my fruit and vegetable consumption.  I now think of it more like a tasty supplement.  It's like real Vitamin Water!  Besides, the solids don't have to be trashed.  The carrot pulp you see in the picture above will be added to some bread, now doesn't carrot bread sound yummy?

A few months ago, I watched a documentary called Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.  Got your attention?  This show really got mine.  I am not going to go into a movie review here, but this is the skinny: Joe Cross documents his life-changing experiment to get healthy.  I will say this is something I think people need to watch, and don't just think that it is a snooze fest because it is labeled a documentary :~)  Joe keeps things entertaining.
This show encouraged me to get the juicer out more often, and get braver about the things I juice.

So, Cheers to my mom and aunt for making me, my brother and cousin juice guinea pigs for an evening and making me drink my veggies from time to time.  Does't that carrot juice look beautiful!?
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Some of my favorite combos:


Carrot, beet
Carrot, Granny Smith apple, celery, ginger
Celery, Granny Smith apple, ginger
Carrot, ginger


Super vitamin-C cocktail
In a blender:
1/2 cup cranberries (fresh or frozen)
1/2-1 cup orange juice
ginger powder to taste (a sprinkle)
Blend for about 1-2 minutes, serves 1


Cheers!

Cranberry Sauce - A Love Story

I love cranberry sauce!

However, it was not until I met my husband that I ever made my own. The first time the subject of cranberry sauce arose, we found ourselves on opposite sides. I explained to him that starting from my earliest Thanksgivings and Christmases, I  recall fighting with my brother over which one of us, the the children in the family, would exercise the privilege of opening the can  of cranberry sauce and plopping the quivering cylindrical mass out on to the special silver plate my family reserved for it and it alone. Further arguing would take place over who which one of us would get to eat the end piece, the one imprinted with the pattern from the lid of the can.

In retrospect, this was an odd tradition considering that my family were otherwise the make it yourself types, at times making all our own bread and even making yogurt and cheese from our own goats milk. But we were quite simply devoted to canned cranberry sauce, and it always had to be jelly style, no berries, or chunks as we called them. I laugh at myself now that I never imagined that I would like to taste homemade sauce, let alone make it myself for my own holiday meal.

Luckily for me, my husband (boyfriend at the time) insisted that he could not imagine a holiday meal without homemade sauce and so I agreed to give it a try (though I insisted on purchasing a can of my old favorite jelly style to have on standby). It only took making and eating it once, for me to be converted for life.

When I got started making my own sauce I used Allrecipes' Cranberry Sauce I recipe. Over the years I have modified it to a point I am quite happy with. It is thick,  tangy, sour and sweet.

 

Cranberry Sauce My Way:

Sugar - 1 Cup

Orange Juice - 3/4 Cup

Cranberries - 12 Ounces

Instant Tapioca - 2 Tablespoons

Heat the sugar and juice in a saucepan until the sugar is dissolved.

Add most of the cranberries along with the instant tapioca. 

 Cook on medium heat, stirring frequently. When the berries have popped and you can mash them up a bit, add the rest of the berries and continue cooking until the most recently added cranberries are popping and soft. ( adding the berried in two stages allows some to cook down into a jam like consistency while others stay nice and solid). At this point transfer the sauce to a bowl and allow it to cool down before covering and refrigerating it.

I find it best made the night before, giving it ample time to thicken and chill in the fridge.

 - Ash

All photographs used in this post are my own.