Healthy Tasty Ways to Make Use Of Produce You Don’t Normally Like To Eat (Or If You Get So Much Of One Veggie You Don’t Know How You Can Possibly Eat It All)

You open the box to your share for the week and low and behold there —staring at you in the face— is (sigh) a veggie or fruit you don’t really care for, is just too much labor to prepare or you have so much of it your thinking what in the world am I going to do with all of this. For this, I have two simple suggestions. Juice and soup.

My blog for this month is just on juicing so if you don’t own a juicer you can skip the rest of this article but be sure to check out my blog next month on soup. Although if you don’t own a juicer and want to get healthy, I highly recommend it. It is great for weight loss, the immune system, allergies etc. My husband has been able to successfully keep his hay fever at bay every spring by doing a juice cleanse. If you are juicing for health it is recommended to do mostly low sugar veggies and some fruits (think Swiss chard and cucumber) and high sugar sweet veggies and fruits (think carrots and apples) in moderation just to taste. Sugary produce should only make about a third of your glass and the rest should be non-sugary stuff, especially green stuff like green pepper and dark leafies. If you go to Food Matters on Facebook they have a lot of great suggestions on healthy juicing.

First off, I suggest not tossing the tops to your carrots and beets, they are excellent in juice mixed with a little sugary produce, and of course like all dark leafies are an excellent source of nutrition. Although Swiss chard tastes great cooked it is not so great for salads. I try not to cook food too much in the summer as it can make you very tired, and your body needs more fresh raw food in the summer. So I took to juicing a lot of the Swiss chard we got over the summer and found that it is a great alternative to coffee when you need an energy boost. I like to eat kohlrabi but find preparing it a pain with the hard skin that has to be removed. But if you throw it in juice no need to remove the skin, just throw it in the juicer whole and it doesn’t taste bad at all. I love green beans but hate the work of having to slice off all the ends, but if you throw them in the juicer, problem solved. And I was surprised to find the juice from green beans is naturally a little sweet —I don’t even need to throw in an apple or orange to improve the taste. Rhubarb if you are not up to making pie is fantastic in juice. It tastes like a slightly spicy celery if you like celery juice. I also tried juicing zucchini for the first time this summer just because we were getting so much of it I was running out of ideas on how to cook it. It does not taste bad in juice at all and I found that even my finicky 6 yr old son will even drink it when mixed with carrot, apple and celery. Normally he will only eat zucchini if it is zucchini bread so I was happy to find a healthier, less sugary way of feeding it to him. The only dark leafies I do not recommend in juice is collard greens and radish greens. There is no amount of beets and apples you can add that will improve the taste in my opinion. But they are nice fried in bacon (what doesn’t taste good fried in bacon).

Green Goddess Juice

1 pound of green beans
1 bunch beet greens
1 bunch of celery
1 medium beet or two small
1 medium carrot
3 apples

Wash all ingredients and press through the juicer. It’s best to drink fresh juices within 10 minutes to get the benefits of the live enzymes.