Juicing at home is an excellent way to get FULL servings of essential fruits and vegetables. Kale for example, is loaded with many powerful antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. Antioxidants are an essential component to our diet because they help fight against free radicals, which are single atoms of oxygen with unpaired electrons. Electrons prefer to be paired, so unpaired electrons search the body to find other electrons that they can pair with. The unbalanced pairing that occurs with free radicals can damage cells, proteins and DNA, which can ultimately lead to cancer and other illnesses. While juicing isn’t the only way to consume antioxidants, green juice is definitely an excellent source.
Unfortunately, many people make the mistake of buying store bought fruit and vegetable juices not knowing that they are overloaded with sugar, which can counteract healthy eating efforts. Today’s recipe discusses the ways in which I “juice” with a blender instead of a juicer. I juice fruits and vegetables every weekend for the week ahead thus, the recipe below is for a large batch of green juice but can easily be halved to yield less juice. These preparation steps can also be applied to other fruits or vegetables to make various types of juices.
Ingredients:
2 green apples
1 12oz bag of kale
2 cucumbers
2 limes
1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger (can use fresh ginger instead)
1/2 to 1 tbs of honey
Filtered or alkaline water
Chia seeds for toppings (optional)
Preparation:
Wash fruits and vegetables; use a strainer to thoroughly wash kale leaves.
Cut the ends off the limes, then cut them in half and use the cut ends to cut the skin off of the limes.
Cut and cube the cucumbers and apples and place in a medium sized bowl.
Mix the cucumbers and apples to make sure they are evenly dispersed.
Place washed kale in the blender so that the blender is about half full and then pack it down to make more room.
Add in cucumber and apples until the blender is just about full. It’s important to leave room so that the blender doesn’t leak at the top during the blending process. ***if making this exact recipe for a large batch, you should load in about half of your kale, limes, cucumbers and apples because you’ll need to repeat the blending process twice***
Add in the ground ginger and honey.
Fill the blender with water until about 1/3 of the blender is full.
Blend until there are no large chunks.
Get two pint sized mason jars or another container, place a piece of cheese cloth (folded in half once) or strainer on top of the jar and strain out the juice then discard of the pulp. Continue with this step until the mason jars are full.
If there is still room in your mason jar after straining fill it with water until the top is full. If you have a lot of air within your jar drink the juice within 1 day but unopened, full jars will stay fresh up to 5 days. Store your juice in the fridge and shake well before drinking because the water and juice components will separate.
Tip: Depending on how much green juice you want to drink per day use smaller mason jars to store juice in to avoid exposing juice to extra air which can alter the antioxidants and freshness of your juice.
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