Juicing

I decided to buy myself a juicer this year, using gift money I received for my birthday. After a lot of research online, I decided on the Breville Compact Juicer which had glowing reviews as high as the Omega brand masticating juicers but only costs about $100, compared to about $300 for an Omega. The Breville takes about 5 minutes to hand-wash, and it cleans easily except for the spinning mesh part which requires thorough scrubbing with a brush. Here is a video with details about the juicer.

This is a juice I recently made - cucumber, celery, carrot:

The thing with juicers is that you are left with pulp. I think that throwing out the pulp is a waste of perfectly good fiber and whatever nutrients didn't make it to your juice. Alicia Silverstone recently blogged about saving veggie scraps in the freezer so you can make your own broth. I had heard about this before but it just seemed so annoying at the time. Like, every time I cut an end off something I have to put it away? What a drag.

Now that I have a juicer, I have loads of scraps and I hate to see them go to waste. So now I have a ziploc bag in the freezer that I am dedicating to veggie scraps. When I have juice pulp or I'm cutting veggies, I can just open the freezer, open the zip bag, and put the scraps in. When I have enough to make a broth, I'll let you know how it comes out.

Do you like fruit or veggie juices? What is your favorite?

Do you save your veggie scraps? What do you do with them?

Vegan on a Shoestring