Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Super Duper Immune Booster! (bum bah da baaaahhhm!!!)


I’m beginning to believe I was even a little too ambitious saying that I would post twice a week, since you can see that obviously hasn’t happened yet… In my defense though, it’s been a very long and very crazy week. What have I been up to? Oh you know, cooking enough food to feed the masses. 200 people to be exact. I was hired to cater a wedding reception for a friend. Crepes bar. Mmmmm! I used over 10 dozen eggs, 1.5 gallons of milk, and approximately 8 pounds of sugar on these crepes alone. About 150 of each the savory and the sweet kind. My spatula and my pan were my only tools. Each crepe batch took an hour to whip up and to let rest, then another hour to crank out the actual crepes. Though, I did learn quite useful tips: savory crepes cook faster and look prettier than sweet crepes. My theory is that this is because of the sugar content in the sweet crepes The sugar caramelizes and makes the crepes have brown spots instead of a nice, even, beautiful shade of yellow like I expect them to have.

Also, I know I promised we were going to start on the 28 day Engine 2 Challenge… but this has yet to be done… It’s so hard! Seriously! My cravings for all things salt and crunchy are so incredibly strong… I need to find the strength to tell them to hush up and let me do my thing! 

My other problem is that I. Love. Food. So much. You know how people are all like, “Eat to live! Don’t live to eat!” Well, I think those people have OBVIOUSLY never had to struggle through prednisone. Those people have never graduated with a degree in delicious food. I am not one of those people.


Enough of my griping. Like I said, I just need to find the inner strength to tell prednisone to “Shut it,” and get on with it.

However, I am making baby steps in the right direction. I LOVE to give my morning a swift kick in the pants to get it moving. I do this by juicing. Now, I would love to tell you all of the benefits of juicing and how you can detox, energize, or boost your little white blood cells to fight off the evil germs of the day, but “Ain’t nobody gots time for that!!” Instead, I’m going to recommend that you watch “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead”. It pretty much converted me to the power of juicing. Here’s the website, summary, and trailer. You can also watch the whole documentary on Netflix if you have that! And let’s all be honest here… You are probably like me and don’t crave the healthy things… I don’t like the way that a lot of vegetables taste. Especially beets. Bleh. No thanks. But see, with juicing, you can pretty well mask the taste of beets with oranges, pineapples, apples, and other strong and sweet tastes! 




In fact, here is my first and favorite way to start off the day: We will call it the Super Duper Immune Booster. (ummm, if anyone comes up with a better name, let me know! Haha)




It’s so simple. I took two apples, about a cup of pineapple, ¼ of a beetroot, 2-3 carrots (except I didn’t put it in the juice in these pictures because I was out… I need to do some grocery shopping! But it’s usually in this juice…) one peeled orange. Also, I don’t usually put kiwi in this recipe, but in this case I did. They were starting to look old and wrinkly so I needed to use them up...



So, just chop up your fruits and veggies to be able to fit into the chute, then start juicing away!

*sigh*...Just look at those beautiful colors...

I also very much love the taste of bananas. But as most of you could guess, there are some things that just don’t juice! So here’s what I do. I just juice everything else first, then pour the juice into my little knock-off bullet blender and give it a whirl. Voila!



Once you have made your juice cocktail, you are more than welcome to add some other things to it. Two of my favorites are raw chia seeds or ground golden Flaxmeal. This way, you get those healthy omega 3’s into your morning!

(side bar: the great thing about chia seeds is that when you soak them, they turn into this tapioca-like thing... It's such a healthy way to make "pudding"! But we will save that for another blog entry)

If you don’t have a juicer, I would definitely recommend investing in one. I know they are expensive, but the health benefits are awesome. You get to squeeeeeze all of those super nutrients out of your fruits and veggies and “eat” a plateful of life sustaining nutrients in just a couple gulps! Or, if you are like me and don’t like beets, this is your way of still getting all of the wonderful things beets offer, but not have to suffer through the taste! Also, I know another argument is that it’s wasteful. Here’s my solution: Get a chicken! Or a garden! Start composting! The scraps and pulp that come off you’re your juicer will give your garden some yummy nutrients. We have a chicken, and she goes crazy when we feed her the scraps. She just loves them! If you get a good enough juicer you will have very little, very dry scraps. My brother bought his new one and it’s very much like that. It also makes a pulpier product, which I love. I’m the kind of gal who buys OJ with extra pulp. Also, his gets the maximum nutrients and juice out of the things you put through it. It’s pretty awesome, I’m not going to lie. The juicer I have my sights set on is only about a couple grand… Pocket change… So yeah, unless I hit some sweepstakes, or the lottery, it’s probably never going to happen!  But that’s ok.

I just bought a juicing recipe book (and by bought I mean downloaded for free off Amazon…) so I’ll probably be doing the recipes on there for a while until my fridge clears out of all the things NOT allowed on this 28 day diet. Then we will re-group and get this started!!  There are only like… 50…. recipes to get through… no biggie… 

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