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Green Juicing: The Best of the Best

Spring is the perfect time to start juicing again. Once the warm weather sets in here where we live, we start to feel the ‘call of juice’. Spring time is generally a great time to eat lighter and allow your body to cleanse and release some of the stored-up junk in your body from the more dense winter foods.

What’s the best type of juice to drink?

Well, that is a matter of personal choice, but if we had to go with one type of juice, we’d definitely pick a standard green juice. You probably hear a lot about the benefits of not only greens, but specifically green juice. Is there an easy way to get these liquid greens into your diet?

Green Juice: The Simple Method

As we’ve been simplifying our kitchen and diet over the last year or so, we’ve thought a great deal about what’s really essential and beneficial to our diets. There is a lot of talk about the benefits of juicing and more specifically, green juice. But nothing sucks the fun and desire out of juicing than dealing with a juicer…the cleaning, the assembling, etc.

Do you need to buy a juicing book to get the benefits of juicing? No. Do you need to buy a juicer? Not necessarily.

We’re going to give you our favorite, streamlined method of the only juice we really make these days.

So, grab the following and let’s get started.

Equipment for Making Green Juice

• VitaMix blender.
• Nut milk bag.
• Glass-bowl (or other bowl with nice pour spout).
• Your fresh produce! (recommended: organic celery, cucumber, green apples, ginger, lemon, and dark leafy greens)

Instructions for Making ‘Simple Green Juice’:

1. Wash, scrub, clean your produce.
2. Start off with anywhere from 1-6 stalks of celery (cut in thirds) and pour in enough spring water (or other filtered water) to nearly cover the celery. Blend in a Vita-Mix or whatever blender you have until it’s all liquid. It may be a little “goopy” from the celery, and that’s ok as long as it is an evenly blended mixture.
3. Add in 1/2 to a full chopped cucumber (de-skinned if non-organic).
4. Add in 1/2 or one whole peeled lemon.
5. Add in one thumb-sized piece of ginger (more or less to taste). Optional but strongly recommended.
6. Cut up a couple green, granny-smith apples and throw them in too.
7. Blend this us into a liquid.
8. Add in as many greens as you can handle. Great ones to add are: chard, kale, spinach, arugula, any lettuce, any sprouts you like, fresh watercress, wheatgrass, etc.
9. Blend it all up into a thick liquid.
10. Get out a nut-milk bag and pour the liquid mash into the bowl through the bag. Squeeze out all the juice you can.
11. Rinse out the blender, pour your green juice back in.
12. Add in any superfood green powders you like (chlorella, spirulina, Vitamineral Green, etc.). Blend on low to medium speed. Taste. Make sure to end your blend cycle on low to remove the foam.

Best to drink right away to maintain all the vital nutrients.

Storing tips: to retain the most amount of nutrients, fill a mason jar with your green juice all the way to the top and seal tightly. Store in your fridge and enjoy within 12 hours.

There is a lot of variations you can do to this juice recipe. The most beneficial variable is to rotate your greens each time you do this. Experiment with every green vegetable you can out there. People will tell you there is all sorts of things you can do to this juice, and they are right, but you don’t really need to worry about it unless you are interested. So if you are busy like us, stick with the base and rotate your greens.

Get on with living your life and don’t spend all your time juicing.

Note: if you don’t have a high-speed blender, buy one. We’re not going to skirt around the issue here and tell you to use a cheap blender. Without a powerful blender, you will be extremely limited in what you can do in your kitchen. We have used our Vita-Mix every single day for the past 5 years. How often can you say that about your kitchen appliances?! Get free shipping on the VitaMix 5200 by ordering through us here.

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This green juice recipe/method is all that you really need to know to get the most from the benefits of juicing. It tastes great, fills you up with valuable nutrients, and is easy to do in a standard raw foods kitchen or just a kitchen with a good blender.

You’ll never need to buy a juicing book now unless you are really interested in trying the multitude of juice varieties out there. There is a lot you can do with juicing and it can be very involved. Fruit juices are fun to drink, but are too much sugar for most people and some fruits will require a separate juicer and won’t work in a nut milk bag.

Related Resources:

• JuiceFeasting.com - This is a site dedicated to a 92 day (or less) juice cleanse in which you drink enough juice in a day to meet your caloric needs. Our green juice recipe is the base for this entire program.
• Heidi’s 35-day juice feast.

~ Raw Food Right Now
http://RawFoodRightNow.com

Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrestlingentropy/3695142138

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 4:51 am and is filed under Raw Food Sphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.