Juicing + Muffin Preparedness

Have you ever seen the documentary "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead"?  Biju and I were flipping through our Netflix suggestions the other day and came across this title.  It sorta grabbed our attentions so we watched it.  We were really intrigued by it.  The man started out pretty overweight and had some sort of auto-immune disease.  (I think that what it was - he kept having rashes all over his body.)

Over the course of 60 days the only thing he "ate" was fruit/vegetable juice.  By the end of his 60 days he had lost a crazy amount of weight and he was almost completely off of his Prednesone medication.  Impressive!  Since I was going to be visiting my parents soon I called up my mom to ask if I could borrow the Jack LaLanne juicer.

It does take a lot of fruit/veggies to make a drink.  From the documentary we learned it takes $14 a day to fund your "meals." ($28 a day if you're going organic - which you should - but good golly that's quite the cha-ching!) 

Through our experiments we've discovered one carrot gives you about 1 ounce of juice.  I don't remember how many Red Delicious apples we used - probably 6? - but we got 4 cups of juice.  Two Gala apples gave us 8ounces, 3 Bartlet pears gave us a little over 8oz, I think (I didn't pay close enough attention to know).  Apple and Carrot go well together.  That's what Biju had as snack yesterday afternoon after work. 

Pear was good, too, though a bit gritty (no surprise, a pear is a pear, right??). Too bad Alex spilled half of it. He did like it enough, though, to try to slurp it off of the table. 

Unfortunately, there is a lot of waste.  I thought this brand of juicer was supposed to have considerably less waste but was not the case... 

8 carrots = a bit of juice and a lot of "waste"

And a lot of clean up!

Which leads me to the second part of this post. 

Back at the beginning of July a friend let me raid her garden while they were off on vacation.  We got some nice looking zucchini and crook-neck squash.   We sliced some up and dipped them in an olive oil/canola oil mixture and the sprinkled them with salt and pepper then tossed them onto the grill.   Y.U.M.!  (BTW - the oils really make a difference.  Twice we tried grilling them w/out the oil and they just didn't go over well w/ the picnic-ers!) 

We had picked up a couple of realllly big zucchinis so instead of grilling those I decided to shred them to put into muffins.  I ended up with 8 cups of shredded zucchini to put into the freezer! 

Food processor w/ grated zucchini; Fine mesh sieve over a bowl, using a cup to press out the liquid; a container to store all the juice (about 2 cups). 

The muffin recipe I plan on using also calls for shredded carrot.  Do you remember seeing all that "waste" from juicing the carrot?  I have frozen that (2 cups worth!!) so I can use it when I need it.  I do like that I can use all the juice for one purpose and all the rest for another!  The muffins will go well into Ajay's lunch box when school starts up next week.



Yummy juice to drink, and zucchini/carrot muffins just waiting to be made!