Green Juice

I drank this. Before you click away in horror, please let me explain...



Remember this guy? The Juiceman? Yeah, I got his juicer. $15 on BismanOnline (our town is weird in that we don't use Craigslist much). When I picked it up, the lady told me her dad used it to juice grapes for wine. It reeked of cigarette smoke and looked dingy, but hey, it was $15. I said thanks much, took it home, scrubbed it down, and proceeded to let it hibernate in my kitchen cupboard for the next month.

Then this weekend, on a whim, I watched Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead on Netflix. It's basically one big long infomercial for juicing (see the trailer here), but I now had a juicer and a bunch of veggies in my fridge thanks to the miracle of our CSA share, so I thought it was time to dust off the Juiceman and see what he could do.

A long time ago I read somewhere that Goldie Hawn drinks green juice every morning. As a die-hard Overboard fan, that stuck with me. I wanted to do that, too. Then maybe a muscular rough-around-the-edges guy wearing plaid would come around and kidnap me and we'd have a house full of rambunctious little boys...

Oh yeah, I guess we're well on our way then.

So here's what I pulled out of the fridge.

Kale, carrots, cucumber, and a beet. I guarantee you all these items were completely foreign to my particular juicer. It was a veggie virgin. I cut the cucumber and beets into chunks, balled up the leaves of kale like it said to do in the instruction manual, and started juicing.

And ta-da!  There's the juice. I added a straw to make it look more appealing - did it work? Admittedly, my $15 Juiceman isn't a great juicer. It didn't get very much juice out of the kale and some of the thinner bits of carrots came out the pulp shoot unprocessed, but it was enough to give me the idea of what juicing is all about before I go invest $300 and precious counter space for a super-duper juicer.

I've never been so reluctant to taste something in my life. I've taken mezcal shots with a worm in the bottom of the glass faster than I took my first sip of this juice. The mezcal shot tasted like I had just licked an ashtray. The juice...well, it was better than the mezcal, but not by much.

I could definitely taste each vegetable, and since I don't like cucumbers nor beets, the deck was stacked against me. It was like V8 without the salt or tomato. Or, better said, like a big glass of liquified grass and dirt. I keep ice cubes of lemon juice in my freezer, so I popped one in and it pepped it up a little. I mixed a little bit with water and found it was more chugable that way, so I topped off my green juice with water, gave it a stir, figured it's not going to get any more palatable, and started chugging. It took eight gulps. I counted.

But you know what? I felt pretty good afterwards. I didn't achieve any miraculous lightness of being or start walking on water, but it kicked off a pretty good day. I realize now that it's pretty hard-core to start off juicing with just vegetables. Adding an apple to the mix would've helped tremendously. But much like caviar, expensive cheese, and Busch Light, it's an acquired taste and I'm willing to give the Juiceman a spin again soon.