The ugliest juice known to man

Ugly Juice – about 8 oz.

• 2 carrots
• sliver ginger
• 1 lemon
• 3 leaves curly kale

This is a seriously ugly juice, people.  We’re talking swampwater surprise.  Especially with the foamy bit on top when it first gets made.  Ew.  That said, it tastes anything but dank.  The lemon and the ginger zing it up and pretty much over the carrot and kale.  It’s a tart, eye-popper kind of a juice.

I tried the trick today of putting the kale through the juicer before the other veggies.  I had my first jam, but it was easy enough to reverse the juicer, get rid of the jam, and then get things going again.  Putting in the kale first worked better: the carrots pushed the leafy bits through and no kale were leaves stuck to the inside of the strainer.

Okay, I didn’t peel the ginger before I put it in.  Should I peel it?  What’s the protocol here?

 

Is drinking your food as much fun as eating it?

One other thing I’m thinking about: Juicing is great if you hate eating your vegetables.  For example, if you think brussel sprouts are gross, or kale tastes too “green,” or if you prefer the crunch of a baguette to the crunch of a carrot.  But I love eating vegetables.  Salad is the first thing I pounce upon on my plate.  I’m a lucky freak that way, I suppose.  But when I juice my veggies, I miss the process of chewing on my food.

There’s also the calorie issue.  I’ve also become more calorie conscious since I started using this very fun and appallingly honest  app.  (I recently wrote about my experience in how calorie counting is a tool to get us more “Reality” based.  It’s not really about the calories, people, it’s about ferreting out and confronting areas of denial.)  At any rate, I’m wondering if I’d rather eat my calories than than slurp them.  Drinking juice just doesn’t fill me up the way a nice plate of veggie does, so I wind up wanting to eat more for breakfast.  On the other hand, juicing encourages me eat this stuff raw – which is supposedly nutritionally good – where I would usually cook up the veggies.  However, in looking on line (always dangerous), there is some indication that heat doesn’t impact all vitamins equally.  In fact, cooking helps some vitamins become more available.  I’m going to check out a book called, “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen” by Harold McGee.  It’s gotten good reviews for being a wealth of research-based information.

Literal food for thought…

Ugly Juice: Nutritional Info

• 2 carrots
  • a whopping 660% RDA Vitamin A  (33,000 IU)
  • 20% RDA Vitamin C (12 mg)
  • 18% Potassium (640 mg)
  • 32% Vitamin K (16.4 mcg)
  • also some B6, Folate, Vitamin E, Thiamin, Manganese
  • calories 80
• 1 lemon
  • 88% of RDA Vitamin C (53 mg)
  • calories 30
• 3 leaves curly kale
  • 308% RDA Vitamin A (15476 IU)
  • 14% RDA B6 (.27 mg)
  • 200% RDA Vitamin C (120 mg)
  • 1021 % RDA Vitamin K (!!817 mg)
  • 14% RDA Calcium (13g mg)
  • 9% RDA Iron (1.7  mg)
  • 13% RDA Potassium (447 mg)
  • 14% RDA Copper (.29 mg)
  • 39% RDA Manganese (.77 mg )
  • calories: 50
  • more info
• Ginger
  • There’s a bunch of trace stuff in ginger, but really since you use so little of it, I won’t count the nutritional info.
• Total Calories: 160