Great energy today. I woke early about 5, the kids came down to bed so we just snigged the morning away.
Breakfast is pumkin, spinach, avocado, banana, and raspberry smoothie. Yummy and super creamy!
Today would be a good day to show my juicing process.
First I blend up all the fruits and veggies, juicy ones on the bottom, less juicy like greens and celery on top. I add as much water as is necessary to get it to blend, just about half a cup at a time. Most days I can juice with just half a cup of water or no water if I have citrus and a cucumber on the bottom.
Then comes the pictoral fun part:
These are the strainers I used $2 at The Home Depot. They come in a two pack. These do let a little more fiber through than real Nut Mylk bags but they are a fraction of the price, and a tiny bit of fiber is not a bad thing.
I put the strainer over a pitcher and pour in the liquid, generally four cups or less because it gets a little unmanageable with too much. This batch is V10, in the order added to the blender: Tomato, Lemmon, Cucumber, Apple, 1/2 cup Carrots, 1/2 Onion, Celery, Spinach, 1/2 beet (amazing how so little over rides all other colors), Ginger. I blended through the onion first, and used the celery to push everything down into the blades, once that was going I added the remaining items still using the celery as a plunger with the Spinach. Then poured 4 cups into the strainer.
Pick up the strainer, note the juice running off is a beautiful purple from the Beet. I could just leave this for an hour or so and 75-90% of the juice would strain through but I am impatient, so I start massaging the juice ball. I have found that when it is full, milking the bottom so that the juice rises makes it come out faster (I am going to have to get a picture of that or make a video). This allows the juice to rise in the strainer, and strain from the unplugged holes above. I continue gently massaging the mass until too little juice comes from each squeeze to warrant my continued effort.
Look how much fiber is left after squeezing the juice out, not too bad considering the giant bulb that was up there just a minute ago. Dump out the fiber into your handy dandy composter (feed it to your worms!!), and you have a bunch of juice. at this point I usually rinse the filter before filtering the rest of the pulp from the blender, it is much easier when the pours of the filter are not all plugged up.
This is the rinsed filter. Note that it is stained green from all of the green juice. So far I have only used 1 in roughly 20 days of juicing (at least on batch of juice every day).
Not much to it, I generally spend 15 min in the morning getting my juice ready that takes me through half the day. So how much is that you ask? Well: here you see the juice from this morning, it started as about 8 cups of pulp (the blender will hold 9 if I am careful. This is a 1 gallon pitcher so from 8 cups of pulp we get just over 1/3 of a gallon of juice (I think this was right at 6 cups).
Make sure to store your juice in an air tight container, and make sure to use an acid in your juice to prevent oxidation, you can see a little foam on top of this juice. I try to drink the foamy part right away because it will start to oxidize, lose vitality and turn brown quickly.
