Learning a new skill or practice always starts with the first time you attempt it. Yet, we as humans seem to think we can skip that first step and just go right to ‘experts’ on our first go. Too funny.
Well, we were no different when it came to juicing.
We got our beautiful shiny new Omega Juicer and set right to work.
We spent hours chopping up carrots and celery and apples into nice little bits. We spent more hours carefully and tediously feeding those little bits into the machine and hoping against hope that we were not over taxing the machine with too many little bits at a time.
The thought of this still makes us laugh out loud. Really? Really! We did what all men are always accused of, no matter the culture or age, it seems. We failed to even READ the instructions! We just assumed we were experts and dove right in. Chop chop chop.
These days the idea of cutting up a carrot or anything that already fits into the feeder for the juicer is so laughable we still get a giggle out of ourselves whenever we use our juicer.
It wasn’t until a couple of months went by, and my husband went home to visit his parents in Europe that we got the wakeup call and another good laugh.
Turns out, in his excitement about juicing, my husband had told his parents all about our adventures and had not left out the endless chopping on the cutting board. His father had smiled warmly, and suggested that he had just seen a television show where they were demonstrating this newfangled thing called juicing, and the people on that show were not chopping up anything unless it didn’t fit into the opening for the juicer…
They were feeding whole carrots and stalks of celery right into the machine and getting juice and pulp out the other end! Imagine that.
Of course I had to try it before he even got home. And, of course, it worked just fine.
No more chopping.
Now, what’s really funny is that some months later we actually sat down and read the Omega juicer manual – and guess what? They suggest that ‘to get the most out of the vegetables you juice you should cut them all up into small pieces’. Forget it. Unless you have hired help with nothing to do, or nothing to do yourself most of the time, just do not even go there. The closest we come to cutting things up is to split large carrots lengthwise, or maybe even quarter them lengthwise, but that’s it. Otherwise the only chopping you do is to fruits and vegetables which are round (and therefore will not fit into the juicer without slicing them up a bit).
We’ve been juicing this way for a few years now and it works just fine. One thing we do pay attention to, when it comes to the manual is not to ever run the juicer for more than 30 minutes at a time without shutting it off and letting it rest. But most of our juicing sessions take a lot less than 30 minutes of continuous running of the juicer. The only time we have to watch the clock is when we are going on travel or something and are making juice to last the next two days or so (we generally do not ever store juices longer than 3 days).
All our worries that the machine would not be able to handle whole carrots or celery stalks or whatever portions of an apple would fit into the top of the chute were for naught. This machine was, after all, built to juice fruits and vegetables! There is no discernible difference in the pulp extruded from cut up vegetables or whole vegetables, that is no extra juice is left in the pulp.
So do yourself a favor, and don’t waste time chopping everything up into little bits for your juicer. IF they will fit into the juicer, the juicer will juice them.
The other big mistake we made early on is related, in a strange way.
It is again, that failure to recognize a new experience and keep it open to experimentation instead of locking it into a way of doing things, or a fast and hard set of rules before you’ve had time to even play around a while.
We fell into a rut. You’d have thought the only vegetables on the planet approved for juicing were carrots and celery! Who had ever heard of anything else? Oh, sure, we’d juice kale and cabbage now and then, and we did love adding apples to just about everything, but by and large our staples were carrot and celery. And so it went.
Mind you, we did love the juice, and we did juice often. But after a while, the juice became a sort of ‘oh that’ known quantity. We juiced our carrots and celery and apples and we called it good.
Sometime during our second year of juicing, we moved to a new part of the country and as a part of that move, we put in a big garden for the first time in a long time. In many ways, that garden was our juicing salvation, because it shook us out of our rut. But it took a while for us to even realize we had been IN a rut in the first place.
It all started with the cucumbers. We had lots and lots and lots of cucumbers. In fact, we had so many cucumbers we didn’t know what to do with them all, and we were way too busy to start making pickles at the time. So we started juicing them.
It was like a revelation! How amazingly delicious are juiced cucumbers? Well, all I can say is you will have to try it to believe it. Especially with a little apple, and maybe half a lemon.
And then there was the chard, and the parsley. The parsley grew to about three feet tall and was just huge. I remembered that when I’d been pregnant with my second child and suffered a bout of anemia my mid-wife had put me on a parsley and orange juice drink I made up in the blender – and so I started juicing the parsley and oranges… Man, what a taste. I could drink that all day long.
Sometime as all of this was going on, we began growing our own barley grass and adding that to the juices as well. It is very green and very sharp (green) tasting, but if you don’t get too crazy with it, it is a great balancer to sweeter fruits and vegetables and it is incredibly good for you.
I still preferred my parsley, but my husband is crazy for barley grass, so I relented.
The lessons here are simple: don’t ignore the directions, but don’t take them as gospel either. Be willing to experiment within reason. Obviously, if something doesn’t fit into the juicing chute, we cut it smaller until it does, but that is really as far as we go. The other lesson? Remember that you are doing something new and don’t let yourself get stuck in a rut because you figure out how to do one thing and then never remember to keep trying new things!
Trust me, the more you experiment with your juicer, the happier and more amazed you will be at what it can do and how delicious your new creative inventions can be.
Oh, and speaking of inventions, there’s another thing I never did – I never read a juicing recipe until after I had been juicing a few years.
And when I did I was appalled. Who are these people and why do they juice one apple, two carrots and one half a ‘beet root’? Personally, if I’m going to juice and drink a juice I make, I want a good 12 ounces or even 16 ounces of juice. I do not count the individual vegetables I juice. I grab a handful of everything, wash it, trim it, and juice it – oh and then I drink it. Just sayin’.
The other thing about this ‘juice recipe’ thing is that so many of the recipes call for 1/2 this, or 1/2 that – well, I don’t need a bunch of half things in my fridge getting spoiled. I know I am normally juicing for two people, but a lot of us are living with at least one other person in our household, so juice accordingly.
When I juice beets, I juice the number of beets in the bunch I bought – usually three. I don’t always juice the beet greens, but if I do, I juice them all. Sometimes they are pretty wilted and sad looking, in which case I chop them up and give them to my chickens. If they are gorgeous and firm