Juicy!

My juicer arrived today! It's a Philips 1861 from Amazon and came with a surprise free Jason Vale recipe book. I whipped it out as soon as it arrived and made myself a yummy glass of carrot, apple, cucumber and celery juice and it was SO good! I then raided the fridge for more veggies and made 1L of juice for me and OH to drink tomorrow morning using 2 apples, 3 carrots, 1 cucumber, celery stalks, broccoli stalk and several handfuls of kale and spinach (note, pack leaves tighter next time for more juice!). But with juice, comes pulp and like hell am I gonna throw it in the bin! It was time to get cooking...


There are surprisingly few juice pulp recipes knocking around the internet. The ones I could find often used very little pulp and were mostly sweet with lots of added sugar and nasties. I wanted a healthy pulp recipe to go with my healthy juice recipe, so I did what I do best and made something up!





Savoury Pulp Muffins

1 cup wholewheat flour
1 packed cup juicer pulp
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarb
2 eggs
heaping tbs sour cream or yogurt
1 tbs olive oil
pinch salt
tsp dried herbs
50g grated cheddar + a few chunks to top

Mix all the ingredients together and dollop into muffin cases topping each one with a little chunk of cheddar.
Bake for 20 minutes at 180C or until a tooth-pick comes out clean.

I wasn't expecting much from these, especially as I'd used such a high ratio of pulp to flour but they're delicious and full of flavour. My housemate reckons they'd be good with a sauce or as dumplings but I like them just as they are. They're quite eggy so those who aren't keen on eggs might want to use just the one and add extra oil and cream.


The muffins only used up 1/3 of my pulp so I tried dumping a cup of pulp in with a tin of tomatoes and some fried onion and courgette to make a pasta sauce. Um... not such a success, way too much pulp. It's perfectly tasty spread on ryvita and would probably make amazing wraps, but was a bit too fibrous for pasta.
Tomorrow I'm going to try adding mince to the remaining "pasta sauce" to make spag bol- I genuinely think it'll be quite nice.


It's pretty clear that I won't be able to keep up with eating all the pulp. As long as I'm not having to compost more than 1/2 of it I'll be happy.

Future juicy plans:

• use cheap fruit & veg being sold off at market at closing time
• research the properties of juiced herbs
  
• try blending in bananas, avocados and other soft fruits
  
• keep fruit pulp separate for savoury recipes
• keep carrot pulp for carrot cake
• conjure up some other recipes for the other vegetable pulp

Ummm... how fab am I otherwise? Well, I still haven't painted my nails and am dressed á la bag lady but at least I'm fabbing from the inside out ;)