My Go-To Green Juice

So in October, Carolyn invited me to meet up with her for a girls' week in Spain and Portugal after her week of working in London - she's getting a lot of blog love lately :)  Knowing I would not be able to turn this offer down, we immediately started checking out travel blogs, booking flights and awesome spots to stay on Airbnb.com - which, if you have not used this site yet definitely check it out for your next vacation.  I'm pretty much tired of hotels at this point, so I love that there is a site where you can find awesome apartments, rooms or entire houses to rent for vacations and short term stays.  The reviews are super helpful too.  But, I digress. 

So we settled on Barcelona, Lisbon and Madrid.  Not too shabby.  Monica got to come for the Barcelona part too, which was so fun.  We ate (and even learned to cook) a ton of amazing food, drank our fair share (and beyond...whoops!) of local wine, and soaked in as much culture as we could in that week.  Photos to come in a post soon.

By the end of the week, I was pretty sure I didn't need to eat again for days.  While everything was really amazing and we thoroughly enjoyed our experience, there was a serious lack of vegetables on the menus there - so cheese, calamari and paella it was then, oh darn :)  I knew I needed to get back on track at home, and I knew the perfect way to help do that.  Juicing is something I got interested in a few years back.  I remember my aunt first telling me about green juice a long time ago, and not being able to fathom how anyone could possibly want to drink spinach?!??  This is of course, before I tried it myself.  

There are so many great juice recipes out there, and it really is so easy to make a great tasting and super nutritious juice.  Juicing really helps let your system take a break and easily absorb lots of vitamins and minerals.  I've only had juice in place of one meal since I've been back, but I can already feel my body thanking me.  While I have experimented with many different recipes, below is the combination I always find myself going back to.  Give it a shot, you may be surprised how much a glass of juice made with real ingredients will fill you up :)

My Go-To Green Juice

• 3-4 large leaves of kale
• 1 handful of parsley
• 1/2 cucumber
• 2 apples (I used golden delicious here)
• a couple handfuls of baby carrots, or 2-3 whole carrots

Wash your veggies and core the apples.  That's all the prep you should need to do.  Juice them in the order shown above, add a few ice cubes if you'd like, and enjoy!

 
If you happen to be in the market for a juicer (Christmas and the holiday season is coming up soon!), check out the Breville Juice Fountain.  We've had it for a couple years now and it does an excellent job of getting most of the juice out of your fruits/veggies.  It is a centrifugal juicer, so the spinning of the center piece does produce a small bit of heat, which cuts down on the nutrients you end up ingesting.  To help retain more nutrients in your juice, you can always go for a cold press juicer, but of course that often comes with a heftier price tag.  Breville does make both types, but I have not personally tried out the cold press version.  If you have, I'd love to know your thoughts on them :)

Breville BJE200XL Juice Fountain (Centrifugal)