delicious and in fact one of our favorite things to do is to add orange, lemon and lime – whewie what a zing! Plus the vitamin C will improve the body’s absorption of the iron and calcium in those leafy greens.
Most important of all, keep playing around as you get started. Why? Because the absolute worst thing that you can do at this early stage of juicing is to listen to some ‘guru’ or take some ‘expert advice’ which convinces you to make up juices for which your palate is not yet adapted or ready and then stop juicing altogether.
Oh, and by the way, if you are a parent, this is doubly and triply true for your kids. Start them off with yams, beets and carrots and maybe throw in a lemon or some celery (not too much!) so they get that super sweet YUMMO taste that has them BEGGING for more. You can work to help them adjust their palate later. And they will – because the real power and beauty and JOY of juicing is that the more you do it the more your palate and your brain and your body wake up and get in the picture and insist you do more of it. It’s a totally natural phenomenon and it will lead you effortlessly to better health and well-being.
Mistakes of Newbie Juicers
While it would be fun to say that we were expert juicers from the start, it would be a flat out lie.
You’d think, with all our research and planning, and given that we actually bought our Omega Juicer as a Christmas present to each other, we’d have been ready to dive in and get it right, right from the start. You’d be wrong.
It’s funny, isn’t it? But whenever you start something new, you seem to expect to know everything there is to know about it before you begin and you forget, or at least we do, that anything new is, well, new.
Learning a new skill or practice always starts with the first time you attempt it. Yet, we as humans seem to think we can skip that first step and just go right to ‘experts’ on our first go. Too funny.
Well, we were no different when it came to juicing.
We got our beautiful shiny new Omega Juicer and set right to work.
We spent hours chopping up carrots and celery and apples into nice little bits. We spent more hours carefully and tediously feeding those little bits into the machine and hoping against hope that we were not over taxing the machine with too many little bits at a time.
The thought of this still makes us laugh out loud. Really? Really! We did what all men are always accused of, no matter the culture or age, it seems. We failed to even READ the instructions! We just assumed we were experts and dove right in. Chop chop chop.
These days the idea of cutting up a carrot or anything that already fits into the feeder for the juicer is so laughable we still get a giggle out of ourselves whenever we use our juicer.
It wasn’t until a couple of months went by, and my husband went home to visit his parents in Europe that we got the wakeup call and another good laugh.
Turns out, in his excitement about juicing, my husband had told his parents all about our adventures and had not left out the endless chopping on the cutting board. His father had smiled warmly, and suggested that he had just seen a television show where they were demonstrating this newfangled thing called juicing, and the people on that show were not chopping up anything unless it didn’t fit into the opening for the juicer…
They were feeding whole carrots and stalks of celery right into the machine and getting juice and pulp out the other end! Imagine that.
Of course I had to try it before he even got home. And, of course, it worked just fine.
No more chopping.
Now, what’s really funny is that some months later we actually sat down and read the Omega juicer manual – and guess what? They suggest that ‘to get the most out of the vegetables you juice you should cut them all up into small pieces’. Forget it. Unless you have hired help with nothing to do, or nothing to do yourself most of the time, just do not even go there. The closest we come to cutting things up is to split large carrots lengthwise, or maybe even quarter them lengthwise, but that’s it. Otherwise the only chopping you do is to fruits and vegetables which are round (and therefore will not fit into the juicer without slicing them up a bit).
We’ve been juicing this way for a few years now and it works just fine. One thing we do pay attention to, when it comes to the manual is not to ever run the juicer for more than 30 minutes at a time without shutting it off and letting it rest. But most of our juicing sessions take a lot less than 30 minutes of continuous running of the juicer. The only time we have to watch the clock is when we are going on travel or something and are making juice to last the next two days or so (we generally do not ever store juices longer than 3 days).
All our worries that the machine would not be able to handle whole carrots or celery stalks or whatever portions of an apple would fit into the top of the chute were for naught. This machine was, after all, built to juice fruits and vegetables! There is no discernible difference in the pulp extruded from cut up vegetables or whole vegetables, that is no extra juice is left in the pulp.
So do yourself a favor, and don’t waste time chopping everything up into little bits for your juicer. IF they will fit into the juicer, the juicer will juice them.
The other big mistake we made early on is related, in a strange way.
It is again, that failure to recognize a new experience and keep it open to experimentation instead of locking it into a way of doing things, or a fast and hard set of rules before you’ve had time to even play around a while.
We fell into a rut. You’d have thought the only vegetables on the planet approved for juicing were carrots and celery! Who had ever heard of anything else? Oh, sure, we’d juice kale and cabbage now and then, and we did love adding apples to just about everything, but by and large our staples were carrot and celery. And so it went.
Mind you, we did love the juice, and we did juice often. But after a while, the juice became a sort of ‘oh that’ known quantity. We juiced our carrots and celery and apples and we called it good.
Sometime during our second year of juicing, we moved to a new part of the country and as a part of that move, we put in a big garden for the first time in a long time. In many ways, that garden was our juicing salvation, because it shook us out of our rut. But it took a while for us to even realize we had been IN a rut in the first place.
It all started with the cucumbers. We had lots and lots and lots of cucumbers. In fact, we had so many cucumbers we didn’t know what to do with them all, and we were way too busy to start making pickles at the time. So we started juicing them.
It was like a revelation! How amazingly delicious are juiced cucumbers? Well, all I can say is you will have to try it to believe it. Especially with a little apple, and maybe half a lemon.
And then there was the chard, and the parsley. The parsley grew to about three feet tall and was just huge. I remembered that when I’d been pregnant with my second child and suffered a bout of anemia my mid-wife had put me on a parsley and orange juice drink I made up in the blender – and so I started juicing the parsley and oranges… Man, what a taste. I could drink that
