Green Pineapple Xpress Juice; Saturday after Ash Wednesday- 40 Days of Meatless Recipes Day 3
Every one of us has had an everyday object, food, idea, concept, something that was just part of their everyday-ness of everyday, until it was brought to life. That's what today's recipe is. Some of you probably know that I make my own green juices all the time and most of the time I don't follow a recipe for them. Usually I'll just throw in whatever produce I've got hanging around and/or is on sale. But occasionally I do follow a recipe. I devised this one this past Advent for a church function. It was just my monthly meeting with the Creation Care Team but we decided to, instead of prioritizing agenda items (even though we did hit them), have a mini party where everyone who is able to bring in a little treat to share does so and we just chat. In other words, a meeting where the main objective was to build camaraderie. I brought the Trader Joe's Beet Crackers, two choices of dips for which they'd be the vehicles, and this green juice. This green juice was inspired by two things.
First, when I hit my one year anniversary since going vegan in February 2019, my family brought me to this restaurant in DC called Fruitive, and I really liked their pineapple express juice and wanted to recreate it at home.
Second, I'm always looking for ways to cut down on food waste and using the same ingredient in multiple recipes is a great way to do that. One of the dips I made for this meeting was the same concept of a spinach and artichoke dip, but I had kale and Brussels sprouts instead of spinach and therefore used those. Instead of taking the extra time to cut them, I juiced them and used the pulp in the dip. It's both zero waste for time and zero waste because the same ingredients are basically being used twice.
So I took those two inspirations and combined them to get the Green Pineapple Xpress Juice as I now know it, and it was a huge hit at that meeting so I knew to keep this recipe.
Ingredients:
- 46oz pineapple juice
- 2 pears
- 2 small apples
- 8oz aloe vera juice
- as much ginger as desired
- any green of choice
My trick with juicing is to juice the greens first, then roots and citrus, and then to add high water produce last. This helps get the most of everything through the juicer but was especially important with this recipe to juice the greens first because then I could get the pulp from that out before juicing the other ingredients that probably wouldn't have worked so well in the dip.
Do any of you ever follow recipes when juicing? If so, please comment some of your juicing recipes.
"Everything that has the breath of life in it, I have given every green plant for food." Genesis 1:30b