Drink Your Veggies

Yesterday I wrote about how we summer-ified our deck on Memorial Day, but there was another big event that took place at our condo that afternoon as well. My husband bought a juicer. Not just any juicer, but a pretty high-end one (the Hurom slow juicer) from Williams-Sonoma that made me yell, "It costs how much???" after he told me of his plans.

"Trust me, I've researched this," he replied, and took off -- returning in a few hours with this space-gadget-looking thing.



That's an action shot, by the way, which I just snapped a few minutes ago as I was trying the thing out by myself for the first time. I will say that it is really easy to both put together and then clean afterward. If it had any sharp parts where there was even the slightest chance I could slice off my finger, OR if there were any parts that need to be cleaned after use yet couldn't be totally submerged in water, I wouldn't even bother. Any type of gadget -- especially one for the kitchen that has to do with food preparation -- must be almost effortless for me to use or else it ain't gonna happen. 'Cause I can always go across the street, order my sweet potato fries, and call it a day.

I'm not exactly sure why my husband suddenly became obsessed with buying a juicer. The idea seemed to have come out of nowhere a few weeks ago. As I mentioned in this post, we are shifting our diet a bit and I'm assuming maybe he thought a juicer would make it easier for us to fit in more fruits and veggies on a daily basis. But I was like, "Why can't we just use a blender?" My friend Nerdy P had recently told me about how she makes smoothies in the morning for herself and her son, and she throws a bunch of spinach in and he's none the wiser. With a juicer, however, it's pretty tough to work with greens (we already tried -- they just don't yield much juice).

I also asked, "Why is this better than a blender when you can't put ice in it and therefore have to put all the juice you make in the fridge/freezer if you want it to be cold?" Then I also asked, "But aren't apple skins and the seeds in berries good for you fiber-wise and whatnot?" (The juicer separates all of that stuff out, as you can see in the container on the left in the pic above. That's also where almost all of the greens we threw in ended up.)

My husband gave some extremely vague answers to my questions, so I'm still not fully convinced we needed this thing. Granted, it's been used more since Monday than the blender and food processor we received as wedding gifts have in nearly eight years, so I'm not complaining. It definitely is nice to just be able to drop fruits and veggies in without having to peel them. I'm not a big veggie eater and this is a very, very slick way for me to "drink" tomatoes, carrots, etc. without tasting them at all. If you simply throw a few raspberries into the mix, all other flavors disappear, so I'm happy about that. Above on the right is today's finished product. At some point I'm going to mix in one of those packets (one's powdered greens, the other is powdered fruit) that I received as samples and see how it goes.

If any of you out there own a juicer and want to help further convince me of why it's better than/different from/needed in addition to a blender, I'm all ears!

- e