Health, Home, and Happiness: New to Juicing- carrot apple spinach juice

New to Juicing- carrot apple spinach juice

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 |

Posted by Cara |

GAPS recommends juicing. Before, I wasn't a fan of juicing because it's only using part of the food, and in general, whole food is best. But in this instance it makes sense to me.

GAPS is focusing on helping the body to be able to digest food as well as possible, and part of that involves giving the digestive tract a 'break' and only having easy-to-digest foods such as peeled cooked fruit and veggies. Since all the fruits on GAPS are both peeled and cooked (other than bananas), GAPS followers are missing the benefits of raw foods. Juicing takes care of the hard-to-digest part of raw fruits and veggies for you.

I am a fan of starting slow with anything, and not throwing a bunch of money at something that I'm not sure will work (see more about this in my post about finding more grocery money). So I waited til we were about a month into GAPS before considering buying a juicer. Then I saved my Amazon certificates (I had about $25 worth at this time) from Swagbucks and read a bunch of reviews on Amazon about juicers. I settled on this one, under $100, but was getting pretty consistent good reviews.

Juicing produce, all from Costco. A huge 10-pound bag of organic carrots for $5, 10 pounds of organic apples for $7, a pound of organic spinach for $3 I think.

The juice. Doesn't it look cool? I was so enthralled with pushing the veggies in that I overflowed the cup that was catching it and it spilled all down the counter and cupboard. Frugal, don't you think?

The pulp. I couldn't bear to throw it out. It's in a jar in the freezer, I'll add it to something some time, not sure what yet. I found that while I could fit half an apple down the chute, it didn't grind it up very well, so I chop up apples into 8ths or 16ths now so not as much is wasted.

This post will be a part of Real Food Wednesday

Labels: GAPS, gut and psychology syndrome, juicing

8 comments:

TurtleOak said...: Way to go! That looks really yummy all layered up like that :)

Did you like it?; November 25, 2009 7:30 AM
Cara said...: Ha! I forgot to post that I did like it. And so does my daughter. I wasn't sure what she'd think of it, so I started with a lot of apple. Now we're adding ginger (a walnut sized amount), 4 carrots, and one apple.

I still need to watch that video you posted about orange juice. I'm looking forward to fresh OJ this winter, though!; November 25, 2009 7:38 AM
Rachel said...: If it's all veggies my friend puts hers in when she is making soup stock.; November 25, 2009 12:51 PM
Alyss said...: Looks yummy. I think people put their juice pulp into breads and pancakes sometimes, but that might not help you much since you are on the GAPS diet. I wouldn't feel bad about feeding that to chickens or putting it in the compost. That way it's getting recycled back into your food system. If you don't compost yet, look into worm composting.; November 25, 2009 4:59 PM
stacey said...: awesome! i laughed b/c i would be totally the same way about the pulp while my husband would roll his eyes at me! :); November 30, 2009 1:14 PM
Cara said...: I need to look into composting. I ended up putting it into this week's stock, we'll see how it goes. I should look into worms for the fruit pulp though; November 30, 2009 2:07 PM
Matters of the Heart said...: This is great. I have a juicer and love certian combos of juice. My fav is carrot, apple and green bell pepper. Yummy!
I'm going to have to pull the juicer out now. :); December 19, 2009 9:43 PM
Kael said...: We're on the GAPS diet and juicing regularly. I save all the pulp and add it to the almond bread recipe in Dr. Campbell-McBride's book (about 1 to 1 1/2 cups pulp to each loaf). It makes the bread tasty and attractive (I've made orange loaves with carrot pulp, green with spinach pulp and pink with beet pulp.); January 28, 2010 11:35 AM