I had heard friends rave about juicing for months, and the raves kept getting louder. Juice for breakfast! Juice for lunch! Juice cleanses and juice fasts and juice as a meal replacement. Or juice just as juice. I wasn’t quite sure what all the fuss was about, but I knew one thing for certain: I wanted to get more fruits and veggies into my diet because, much as I love them, I just wasn’t eating enough of them and was replacing those good calories with empty ones from carbs and processed snacks. And a couple years ago, Danny’s grandfather had given us a juicer he only used a few times. We had no reason to not test it out for ourselves. So, a handful of times over the last week and a half, we’ve juiced. We’ve already kind of fallen in love with it. The fruit goes in; thick, fresh juice comes out, naturally sweet and without any added sugar. The consistency is almost like a latte, whipped and frothy, and the flavor is generally a blend of the sweetest ingredients — for us, that’s been any combination of carrots, strawberries, apples, oranges, cucumbers, kiwi, melon, and mangos — and the zingy-est ingredients, like ginger. The flavors of kale, celery and other veggies almost entirely disappear under the sweetness of the fruits.

What you see coming out of the juicer below is carrot on the left and orange on the right.Maybe someday we’ll upgrade to a masticating juicer, with an attached pitcher — but then we wouldn’t be able to watch the way the colors come out and swirl together like a rainbow. After we stir it all together though, I can’t say a lot of good things about the color of these juice blends — they’re usually an orange-tinged brown or pea green — but the way they taste? Excellent. The way they fill us up far more than any store-bought juice ever has? Fantastic. The way they leave us feeling afterward? Amazing. So now we know what all the fuss is about. We couldn’t agree with it more.

~ Laura