Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Love At First Sip

Their eyes met across a crowded grocery cart.  He was a leafy green, she was an exotic islander.  The moment was ripe, and once Kale married Pineapple, they knew it was meant to be.

Sweet Union:
4 branches of kale
1/2 head iceberg lettuce
1 cucumber
3 stalks celery
1/2 pineapple
A pair of star-cross'd lovers.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Orange You Glad Tomorrow's a Holiday?

This is a must try recipe.  It was particularly refreshing on this 90+ degree day.

Lemon-Orange Juice
1 head romaine lettuce
7 carrots
1 lemon
2 oranges
1 apple
The juice naturally separates after a couple minutes.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Juicing For Dinner

This past week was a tremendous success with juicing for dinner.  I put a lot of thought into my juice everyday, as I was preparing my family's dinner.  It added to the satisfaction to take my time laying out and prepping all the veggies and fruits.  Each day I made a generous amount, just for me, and drank it slowly at the table with my husband and kids.

Because I get such a rush from the vitamin boost of raw juice, I felt very good after my "dinner".  And because I ate a normal breakfast and lunch, (and I'm still taking my prenatal vitamins) I wasn't nervous about calorie intake/protein intake since I'm breastfeeding a 2 month old.

The Reboot Your Life program by Joe Cross does not recommend any juice fasting for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.  But a little common sense goes a long way when you are trying to take good care of your body and find a way to fit juicing into your life.

No nutritional deficiencies here.


Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Italian Asparagus Juice

If Martha Stewart can drink asparagus juice, than so can I.  I'm just going to add many other veggies and fruits to hide the flavor.

I cooked Italian for my family tonight.  The air was thick with the fragrance of garlic, basil and tomato sauce.  So I decided to make an Italian Asapargus juice.
Viva, Italia!
Prego, It's In There:
2 cups asparagus
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves
3 stalks celery
1 cup romain lettuce
4 tomatoes
2 carrots
1 apple
1 orange



Monday, May 21, 2012

Apple Trees and Bee's Knees

This is my 5th year since I planted my little baby apple trees.  They have quadrupled in size since then.  Even though they may not get much taller (they are dwarf variety), I look forward to their maturation so that I can eventually take down the protective deer fencing I have around them.  The deer in our neighborhood love to dine in my yard.

Speaking of dining, I am trying out replacing my dinners with a huge 35 ounce juice this week.  It was especially difficult when I was sprinkling bleu cheese over my family's barbeque chicken sandwiches.  But once I started sipping my juice I felt satisfied!  This recipe is the bee's knees!

Dinner For One:
3 stalks celery
1 cup spinach
1 head romaine lettuce
1 zucchini
3 apples


Future Juice.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Grilling Weather

Fire up the grill, because it's grilling weather outside!  Who wants the oven heating up the kitchen when it's so sunny outside?  And when it comes to getting your veggie fix, don't forget the sweetness and depth of flavor that roasting or grilling gives to vegetables!

A little butter or oil with simple seasonings, wrapped up in a foil pouch, is all you need for some yummy, colorful courses in your dinner tonight!

Summer squash and zucchini quartered with a pat of butter, sprinkling of parmesan cheese, salt and pepper.

Squash squashed back together and wrapped tightly in foil.
Grill on medium for 25-30 minutes
Veggie Fix:
1 head romaine lettuce
2 c. spinach
1 cucumber
4 stalks celery
2 apples
2 oranges


Thursday, May 17, 2012

Pineapple Mint Lemonade

Pineapple definitely dominates this juice, but the mint scent is intoxicating.  If you like a lemony juice you might want to increase the amount to one whole lemon.

Green and Foamy:
2 cups spinach
3 stalks celery
1 cucumber
1 cup mint leaves
1/2 lemon
1/3 pineapple
2 apples


Sunday, May 13, 2012

A Minty Mother's Day To You!

Today my daughter informed me that there is a lot of mint coming up in our garden patch.  This did not surprise me at all as mint literally grows like a weed.  A good thing, too, because we use it all the time.  Our favorite use of mint is in our homemade lemonade, but I also boil it in my simple sugar syrup, which I keep in the refrigerator for yummy mixed drinks.  How glorious to find a new way to use mint in juicing recipes! 

Minty Medley:
4 branches kale
2 cups iceberg lettuce
4 stalks celery
1/2 cup mint leaves
3 apples
1/2 cup rasberries




Saturday, May 12, 2012

My Cup Runneth Over

A delicious and very juicy collection of produce reminds me to

1.  Put pitcher under fountain before I begin juicing
2.  Watch level of juice in pitcher before I add two oranges

Ah, these lessons in life are necessary and funny, really...once you get all the sticky juice cleaned up!

Abundant Blessings:
1 head romaine lettuce
1 cucumber
2 tomatoes
5 carrots
1 apple
2 oranges

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

It's My Birthday, And I'll Juice If I Want To

Happy 30something birthday to me!  I woke to a huge banner that my husband and kids made for me, and to a fabulous energizing juice.  It's a classic combo that does it for me every time.

Button Classic:
3 branches kale
3 stalks celery
1 cucumber
2 oranges
1 apple
"Happy Birthday, I love you baby."     "Thanks, I know!"

Friday, May 4, 2012

Fat Kids Don't Throw French Fries, a review of Pamela Druckerman's "French Children Don't Throw Food"


If there is a more provocative, inflammatory accusation towards women than poor childrearing, I don’t know what it is.  Yet in chapter after chapter this is precisely what American readers are subjected to in Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food.  
The author, a native New Yorker, relates a story of love, childrearing and culture shock as she marries a Brit, gets pregnant and raises her three children in Paris.  Not exactly a tale of infatuation with Paris and all things French, the book’s main theme concerns the stark contrast Druckerman sees between her own children’s behavior and the perfect little French children around her.  

Essentially, she and her husband would like to be able to dine at a restaurant with their pre-school aged children, have them sit still, eat le poisson and vegetables, not drop things on the floor and of course not throw any food as per the title, with a nod to Mireille Guiliano’s bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat.  How can Druckerman and her Anglo spouse get their children to be obedient in public and behave calmly while entertaining dinner guests? 

The answer is to imitate French parents, and their antics in attempting to do so make for an entertaining read; Druckerman has a good sense of humor, and I laughed out loud many times during the book.  The chapters on her pregnancy and marriage are especially funny, as is her description of her husband’s charming helplessness:

[Simon] can’t drive a car, blow up a balloon or fold clothes without using his teeth.  He fills our refrigerator with unopened tins of food.  For expediency’s sake, he cooks everything at the highest temperature.  (University friends later tell me he was known for serving drumsticks that were charred on the outside and still frozen on the inside.)  When I show him how to make salad dressing using oil and vinegar, he writes down the recipe, and still pulls it out years later when he makes dinner.

So what’s the trouble with this book?  First of all, in virtually every single aspect of childrearing -- night time parenting, nursing, discipline, nutrition, education, nurturing -- Druckerman presents French (more accurately, Parisian) methods as both the opposite of, and as superior to, American (more accurately, New York City) methods.  The same repetitive tune is sung throughout the whole book, even if occasionally there are intriguing aspects to Parisian parenting methods.  For example, French parents are, according to Druckerman, able to get their babies to sleep through the night by three months, by which point the baby is ‘Elle fait nuits,” “doing her nights.” After only six weeks, their babies have learned to eat at 8:00am, noon, 4:00pm and 8:00pm, and that’s it.  No snacking, no baggies of cereal, nothing to tide them over.  

Ultimately what Pamela Druckerman is doing is comparing a tiny sliver of a foreign culture to a tiny sliver of American culture.  Apparently, the American parents that she has spent time with do not possess the natural sense of authority which she sees French parents confidently wielding.  Plus she admittedly has spent all her time in Paris moving in circles that are not that of the majority of French population.  There is no reason to think the book’s vignettes are particularly representative of any wider “American” or “French” culture. 

Even though Druckerman’s anecdotes cannot be generalized, one can learn about upper-class Paris culture from this book.  One takeaway concerns eating habits.  Druckerman can’t help but notice the overall slimness of the mommies in Paris, and the shocking truth -- are you ready for this -- is that French women are slender because they don’t eat much food.  More interestingly, the healthy habits they teach their children seem to deter them from being picky eaters: a big protein lunch with a light veggie dinner, nothing after dinner, exposure to all sorts of flavors from babyhood, exposure to different flavors and textures of food as well as teaching children to bake and cook.  I myself have a picky eater.  If given the choice, my son would only eat American cheese, white bread and Honey Nut Cheerios; dinnertime often becomes dreadful when we force him to try new foods.  This book made me wonder if an opportunity was missed when he was an infant to expose him to a wide variety of flavors and textures.  Here was a conversation Druckerman witnessed between the chefs at her child’s pre-school as they discuss the school’s Christmas meal:

‘The foie gras, no?’ one chef suggests as an appetizer.  Another counters with the duck mousse.  At first I assume that they’re both joking, but no one laughs.  The group then debates whether to serve the children salmon or tuna for the main course (their first choice is monkfish, but [one chef] says it’s too expensive).  And what about the cheese course?  [One chef] vetoes goat’s cheese with herbs, because the kids had goat’s cheese at their autumn picnic.  The group finally settles on a menu that includes fish, broccoli mousse and two kinds of cow’s milk cheese.  

Interesting?  Check.  Amusing?  Also check.  The way normal French people live?  Surely not. 

Zucchini-Spinach Blaster

Ohio weather has been hot and humid the last couple days.  Nothing says summer weather more than zucchini recipes.  People who have grown zucchini in their gardens can relate.  All the sudden gardeners have zucchini coming out of their ears and have to add it to recipes and give it away to family and friends to use it up. 

Juicing zucchini is fast, fresh and raw.  After today's recipe I don't see how I can't grow zucchini this summer in my juicing garden.

Drink Your Zucchini:
1 zucchini
2 c. spinach
1 cucumber
3 celery stalks
1 orange
1 apple
4 strawberries




Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Squash, Anyone?

My alma mater just finished third in the nation for Rugby.  My husband found the game streaming online and I watched approximately 15 seconds of it until I saw the players running around the field in a huddle.  Speaking of weird sports, I know nothing about squash except what I learned from the movie Bend It Like Beckham.  Oh, wait that was cricket. 

Moving on to summer squash, a subject I am much more familiar with.  My favorite way of preparing it is sliced, seasoned, wrapped in foil, cooked on the grill.  But juicing squash is very yummy and rewarding as well.

A Winning Combo:
1 summer squash
3 celery stalks
2 tomatos
4 carrots
1 cucumber
2 oranges
4 strawberries
Score!


Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Vitameatavegamin

Lately juicing has been a quick answer to various problems.  Wake up on the wrong side of bed?  Have a juice.  Feeling sluggish and in need of energy?  Let's juice.  Need an attitude adjustment?  Time for a juice.  Hungry between meals?  You guessed it...juice.  It looks like I'm trying to sell a bottle of some super-cure-it-all medicine, but I'm no phony, this is for realsies.

All Purpose Juice:
2 c. spinach
1/2 c. red cabbage
3 stalks celery
1 cucumber
1 apple
8 strawberries
1/2 c. mango

"...and so tasty, too!"




Bonus Breakfast Blend:
2 c. iceberg lettuce
4 stalks celery
1 c. broccoli
2 oranges
2 apples
Face the day with this under your belt.