Green Juice

I was inspired by Kris Carr to incorporate a green juice into our daily routine. This is what Kris Carr says about green juice: “guzzling green goodness balances your  pH and gives you a direct shot of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, protein and oxygen”. What better thing to have first thing in the morning to start your day out right?! I try for at least 5 days a week of green juice. Sometimes it’s more, and more often, it’s less. I’m a huge kale fan, so putting kale in my juice seems like a pretty good idea to me, though I know Eric is a little less than thrilled with that idea. Nonetheless, we both drink the green juice and it gives us lots of good energy for the day.

You can juice pretty much any fruit or vegetable, but the ones we juice most often are kale, lettuce, cucumber, celery, broccoli, chard, limes or lemons, and apples.  The apples aren’t totally necessary, but the sweetness sure helps cut the sometimes-harsh wake-up of straight-up greens early in the morning.

Shopping for Juice:

Juicing can be expensive, both because a juicer can be pricey, and because it takes a lot of vegetables and fruits to make a glass of juice. I’ve figured out what I think is the cheapest (while still being healthy) way of buying ingredients for the green juice. It requires several stops, but I find that it’s nice to shop at a few different places anyway. First stop: MacPherson’s vegetable stand on Beacon Hill. I’ve seen other places that look like this open-air vegetable stand around town, but have never stopped. So I don’t know if their prices compare to MacPherson’s, but you can leave this place with 2 full grocery bags of vegetables and fruits for under $15. There’s really no beating the prices. The selection includes some organic produce and so we try to buy whatever organic veggies and fruits they have on the day we go. I almost always buy whichever type of organic apples they have, the limes (non-organic, but 6 or 8 for $1), cucumbers (also non-organic, but 3 for $1), and then I check for organic greens and celery (which usually they don’t have). Next Stop: farmers’ market (usually Georgetown, Columbia City, Capitol Hill, or Madrona, depending on what day it is). Here, I can most surely find organic greens (kale, chard, lettuce) all for no more than $3 a bunch (or 2 for $5-most farmers will let you mix and match) and celery is sometimes hit and miss (sometimes it’s there, sometimes not). Last Stop: If I can’t get any of the items I need at the farmers’ market, I’ll pick them up during our normal weekly grocery trip (usually PCC). The grocery is usually my last resort for vegetables and fruits because they’re usually very expensive there and I’m usually looking to buy a lot of them (for juicing and eating)!

Also, at the grocery store you can pick up the ginger juice for the recipe. A quick note about the ginger–I finally stumbled upon ginger juice in a bottle after getting really frustrated that our juicer wasn’t actually juicing the ginger root I was sending through it (fyi, they have extremely inexpensive ginger root at MacPherson’s). Using the microplane each morning to grate ginger into our juice was driving me crazy (and it was causing little chunks of ginger to end up in the juice). So, I was absolutely giddy when I discover the ginger juice by the ginger people. The bottle is around $3.50 and a little goes a pretty long way:

The Recipe:

Serves 2:

1 cucumber (deseeded and peeled, if not organic)

4 stalks celery

4-5 leaves of lettuce

4-5 leaves of kale (I’ll sometimes save the stalks from kale we’ve eaten and use those)

1 lime, peeled

1 apple

1 tsp ginger juice

Wash, peel, and cut vegetables/fruit as needed.

They obviously only need to be cut small enough to fit into your juicer. Juice all the vegetables and fruit, and then add the ginger juice before you pour it into glasses. Drink up, before it separates! You can easily substitute other things for these ingredients; this is just the one I make most frequently. Tip: wash the juicer right away (I never want to, but it’s a nightmare to clean if it sits in there all day long)!