Happy St. Patrick’s Day, and what better day could there be for a green smoothie?

I’ve been meaning to get into green smoothies for a while, and recent emails I’ve gotten as part of the Taste Better “ideal breakfast” series suggest they’re pretty popular, so I finally went for it – it turns out there are more ways to use kale than just kale chips!

This one was totally simple: one banana, about the same amount of kale (in size; I didn’t weight it) and some water.  I blended it up in the Vita-Mix [aff. link, but free shipping!], and it was a bit gritty but tasted better after I added some ice and blended it for a few minutes (without the ice the Vita-Mix turns smoothies into warm soup, and I prefer a cold drink.)

I didn’t measure the water I put in, but while it didn’t seem like a lot I ended up with 3 pints of smoothie, which was pretty filling by itself, plus I remixed the last pint with a scoop of protein powder (I used Absolute Vegetarian Protein, which is 26g of soy, rice, and pea protein per scoop at the lowest overall price I’ve found) which I found helped with the overall texture, smoothing things out a lot.  Which is probably desirable for a smoothie.

From the mails I’m getting, a lot of people add several different fruits to their green smoothies, including strawberries and kiwi, but the core ingredients seem to be a banana and some kind of leafy green, such as kale, lettuce, chard, etc.

I’m getting tired of the bland countertop photos, so I took this one by the window:

As you can see, it was pretty foamy, but that’s after a minute or two of separation (the version with protein powder was a bit more homogenous.)  Depending on your tastes, you can either drink it right away or let it sit for 5-10 minutes for a different texture.

As you can tell, I’m still working on finding ways to add juices and smoothies to my everyday routine, but at the moment I’m pegging green smoothies as a good 2PM pick me up – it’s obviously easier to do when you’re home at that time, but something like a Magic Bullet might work in an office environment – it’s something we talked about at my last workplace but never got around to trying.  Is anyone doing that?  Let me know in the comments!

After a week filled with a whole lot of JuicyNothing, (at least!) two big insights last night:

The first is that while clever, the “TGIF” theme of making an alcoholic juice or smoothie has a certain flaw in that it either has to be made in advance or written about the next day, like this post is, because drinking and blogging, while entertaining, has its own set of hazards.  I’d put it as safer than drunken emailing or eBaying, but perhaps not by much.

The second is this: we need to consume juice like (some of us) consume booze.  Cooking’s like this too.  Let me explain:

I made fresh pineapple juice, which, by the way, is incredibly tasty and thick and amazing and I can’t believe I ever drank the canned stuff, but I didn’t have any real plan for what booze to mix it with.  I ended up using peach schnapps and rum in one glass, and then just rum (but far, far too much rum) in the second.

It’s pretty obvious that these weren’t planned drinks, and while I know a few people who pride themselves for having gone to actual bartending school, most of my acquaintances use drink guides as just that: a guide.  The first one or two might be textbook perfect, but as the night goes on proportions slip, new ingredients get added or substituted as bottles empty, and judgements aside, at the end of the night, it’s about having fun and trying new things.

With juicing, it really doesn’t matter what proportions you use when making the ultimate apple carrot ginger juice, for example.  Witness most juice recipes that specify the number of fruits and vegetables to use – they don’t give precise measurements for each juice type down to the ounce or millilitre, and there’s a reason for that: every drink’s a little bit different, and that kind of becomes the thing that matters: it’s about having fun and trying new things.  Or it ought to be, anyway.

Oh, and in lieu of a poorly lit photo (working on those, honest!) I made a music video for you.  Shut Up Woman Get On My Horse was playing in the background, and Angela was doing stuff, unaware of my filmmaking opus:

OK, I had two problems today: I run a website about juices and smoothies, and it doesn’t have any smoothie-related posts on it, and secondly, I had a big bowl of leftover chilli that just… didn’t taste right.

It wasn’t bad chilli; there was just something about the spice mix that didn’t appeal to us.  Fortunately, I discovered that it tasted better cold (some spices just taste dramatically different depending on the temperature,) but eating a bowl of cold chilli just seems sad.  Like I’m one step away from eating directly out of a can.  Over the sink.  Not that I ever do that.

So I thought to myself, self, why don’t you make your first chilli smoothie?  That’s right, I turned this:

…Into this:

You may think that this is a really bad photo, but note that I am not apologizing.  I have nothing to apologize for, really, other than the fact that I made a chilli smoothie.  The thing looked really, really bad.  There’s no way you’ll see this in a restaurant that wants to stay open for more than a week.

I always took solace in the fact that the Vita-Mix would be a handy thing to have if I ever broke my jaw; I just didn’t expect I’d be doing a dress rehearsal.

The chilli had a fair bit of liquid in it, but not enough to produce more than a slurry of smoothie.  I was faced with a horrible choice: add water to the mix, resulting in a larger quantity of what might be a very bad idea, or drink it thick, in which case it wouldn’t pour as much as tumble into my mouth and down my throat.

I went with the thicker version, and other than the weird “I’m not proud of what I’m about to do but this is for science” sentiment I was feeling during the process, the chilli smoothie was actually a pretty good success.  It’s definitely the strangest protein-rich smoothie I’ve made, but I saved a lot of money on powders this way…

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to kick back a bit, and if you consume alcohol but don’t incorporate your juicer into your drinking I’m here to assure you that you’re missing out!

After my post about the R2D2-ness of my lemon juicer, I noticed that the photo I picked featured oranges, not lemons. Believe it or not, I’d never put an orange through the press-style juicer before!

And I had some Barnivore-approved vodka handy. Science beckoned!

So let’s get to it: I love my R2 unit for lemons, and now I know why: it’s only 2 lemons, max, at a time, which means 4 presses of a smallish fruit. Oranges are bigger, which means I have to press harder, and while I dilute the lemons heavily (usually 1 lemon per quart/liter of water,) these oranges were being diluted with alcohol, which meant I needed more of them.

Because I am somewhat lazy and also needed to retain the ability to write, I ended up using just one orange, which made for one small, if stiff, drink:

(By the way, I highly recommend these Bodum Pavina Double-Wall Thermo Glasses (affiliate link) for lowball drinks with ice – the insides stay cold longer, and your hand stays warm, plus it just looks cool!)

If I was planning on more than one drink, I’d definitely fire up the Jack LaLanne and make a small pitcher of juice; it’s worth the cleanup time, and also establishes a cutoff point, because I probably wouldn’t make more juice later in the evening.

For one juice though, it was pretty tasty. One advantage (in my opinion) of the R2 over a shred-disc style juicer is that there’s no pith at all, which makes for a really sweet drink, and I guess that needs to be considered – I’ll try a taste test post on some Friday to come, if only because it makes “how’s work?” conversations totally awesome

Whatever your juicing technique, a fresh screwdriver is definitely worth the effort over store-bought juice. There was some noise last year about how concentrated orange juice is produced, and it was pretty nasty: a lot of the juice you can buy in stores has been in storage for a year or more, and that’s just for starters. Why, it’s enough to drive one to drink…

If you don’t luck out at thrift stores, eBay, or Craigslist, getting started in juicing can be a serious investment.  One easy practice to start with can be adding fresh lemon and water to your morning routine.

Method 1: your hands

The cheapest and messiest way to do this is to cut a lemon in half and squeeze it over a glass with your bare hands while making Hulk sounds.  The Hulk sounds are not optional.

Pros: Cheap, hands readily available, get to sound like the Hulk.
Cons: Messy, doesn’t get as much juice as other methods.

Method 2: citrus reamer

Next up is the simple citrus reamer, which is basically a roundish grindy thing on a stick and looks like this:

I’ll confess, I’ve never used one of these (I skipped right to method 3,) but it seems just about as messy as the bare hands method, and I don’t think you get to make Hulk sounds.

Pros: You can feel superior for using simple tools.
Cons: Still messy, no Hulk sounds.

Method 3:  citrus juicer

There are a lot of variants to this one, but here’s what I grew up with:

You can get handheld squeezer versions, motorized versions, and even attachments for your food processor, but I always liked the manual style as shown.  They can be a little hard to find if you don’t want the motorized type (I think those are overpriced for what they do and take up too much space) so Amazon’s a good friend here.  Here’s a link to a bunch of them because I had a search open while writing this (and yes, it’s an affiliate link so if you buy something through it we get a kickback.)

Pros: Simple to use, efficient.
Cons: Does not look like R2D2.

Method 4: The Juice Press

This brings us to where we’re at now in our home, with a full-on juice press:

Come on, am I the only one who sees the R2D2 resemblance? The one we use at home is a vintage Juice King model from the ’50s or so (I think,) which is a little battered but works great. I think of it as R2 during the Battle of Yavin, and the one pictured above is the polished version for the medal ceremony at the end, but I’m a bit of a geek.

Like I said, ours is really really old and it still works great.  Sure, you can use the same massive juicer that you use for your apple carrot juice etc., but the cleanup time is way higher – we basically just run the removable cup under the sink when we’re done.  Sorry to be all commercial and stuff, but the one pictured is only $5o at the time of this post on Amazon, and it’s a darned pretty way to get started juicing.

Pros: Easy to use, fast cleanup, looks like R2D2.
Cons: Takes up counter space.

No matter what method you end up using, fresh lemon juice and water is an incredibly healthy addition to your routine.  Your tastes will vary, but here we typically mix 1 litre (or quart) of water per lemon in a pitcher, or if I’m in a hurry I’ll have half a lemon in a pint glass of water.

I’ve heard recommendations to add cayenne pepper to the mix, but haven’t gotten into that yet.  Limes also juice well with these techniques, though they’re smaller so you may need more of them.

This juice takes me back to Christmas 1992.  Time compresses in interesting ways, but for me, in my memory, 1992 was the glory year for informercials, with Stop the Insanity, Tony Robbins, Tony Little (I think,) and, maybe most useful of all, Juiceman Jay Kordich.

Though I wasn’t vegan at the time, my mom was vegetarian, so I found her a $40 juicer and Jay’s book for Christmas that year and then got caught up in the enthusiasm and got the same combo for myself (I wish I could remember the brand, it was really awful.  Grapefruit juice took half an hour from start to finish with the most awkward cleaning process I’ve ever experienced with a juicer…)

I have no idea how valid the claims were in the book, but I thought it was a really useful starter into the world of whole foods, with a big list of produce and the various vitamins and minerals that could be found in each one.  Jay’s story was also in there, in which he claimed (and I’m going purely from memory here) that juicing every day cured his bladder cancer, and in particular carrot-apple juice was his “go to” juice.  (Again, purely from memory, apologies to Mr. Kordich if I’m mistaken, and it’s just a lengthy story to lead up to the juice of the day.)

So today I made it:

This was three medium to large sized carrots, and a random collection of apples from the bin: a red delicious and two smaller ones (spartan?), juiced in the Jack LaLanne and producing the pint glass you see here.

Carrots are really sweet on their own, and the apples add a soft tartness to the mix. If you want to make this a Tuesday Threefor, I’d recommend adding a bit of ginger (to taste, but if you’re like me, as much as you can stand!) Ginger’s health benefits are often vague, but it is known to be active against a form of diarrhoea that’s known to cause infant deaths in developing countries, so I like to do my part to help.  Wait, what?

I had some random fruits at the bottom of the bin, so I decided to add a clementine to the grapefruit juice I’d been having in the mornings lately:

As you can see, it’s a little more orange… It was also a lot sweeter, so this would be a great juice to try if you want to add more grapefruit to your routine but find it too tart.  I can’t imagine an all-clementine juice fitting under my “oh crap that’s too sweet” threshold, but though I’m sure I’ll end up trying it sometime for a Monday One-Day

I’ve no idea what the nutritional benefits of clementines are that might be separate from what you’re already getting from the grapefruit.  Mostly this is a “hey, these are easy to peel!” solution when you’re fighting to finish off a crate of those little oranges.

Today’s single-ingredient juice is grapefruit. I honestly don’t remember if this was a red, pink, white, or teal* grapefruit, but this is one of my favourite pick-me-up juices for the morning:

As with all juices, your throughput will vary according to the size of the fruits used and to a lesser extent your juicer, but I’m finding that 2 grapefruits fill up a pint glass pretty nicely.  I use the Jack LaLanne juicer for this one.

Grapefruits are crazy good for you and have a relatively low sugar content. I thought the facts presented here were pretty interesting, including the study where people who ate grapefruit with every meal lost weight – I’m not going to look into it too much (too many other great fruits and vegetables to try!) but just knowing I can nail my vitamin C and A RDAs with one glass of juice is pretty cool.

This is also one of the examples of what I love about juicing: I find my teeth get sensitive if I eat too many citrus fruits in a week (like, more than one every other day or so,) so juicing is a great way to enjoy the flavours with less irritation.

* one of these varieties is made up. Guess which one!