Culinary Coup

A new juicer proves you don't need to be a cook to make magic in the kitchen. By LYNN TRYBA

To say I don’t like cooking would be an understatement. I’ll be 40 this year, and I still haven’t moved beyond the skills I learned in junior high Home Ec (thank you, Mrs. James). So, if you want oatmeal, a fried egg or a grilled cheese sandwich, I’m your gal.

While my kitchen looks normal in that I have pots, pans and even a collection of cookbooks, the only tool I use with any consistency is my coffeemaker. And, of course, the corkscrew.

That is, until I bought a juicer last month. I realize using a juicer is not really cooking – I just push produce into a machine and juice comes out – but to me, the juicer is magical.

Each morning, I feel the same sense of wonderment I had making mud pies in my sandbox as a kid. I was so enthralled with my life-like pastries that I thought maybe, just maybe, the mud had actually become a sugary dessert. So, naturally, I would put some in my mouth. If only this had been a one-time occurrence, maybe I would have been more into cooking as I got older.

But I digress. If you are also challenged in the culinary department, consider buying a juicer. It feels like cooking, you get to drink healthy juice and the “recipes” are so easy, I feel compelled to put the word in quotation marks so you get the joke. You simply cannot fail. When I told a co-worker I had bought a juicer, she immediately jotted down her favorite recipe for me. It was: two carrots, one to two apples, one to two stalks of celery, half a beet and two strawberries. See what I mean? Foolproof. You just rinse, peel what needs peeling and cut things into appropriate sizes. The machine does the rest.

Given this, it’s a tad embarrassing to recall the perverse pride I felt when I realized my friend’s “recipe” needed a little something. After a few seconds, I decided to add another strawberry. Voila! Perfect sweetness achieved! Just call me Julia Child, thinking on her feet. (There is probably someone hipper – or perhaps even alive – whom I should be referencing here, but since I do not cook, I do not know.)

Here’s another reason to use a juicer: You get most of your daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables in one glass. There is something so virtuous about drinking all your fruits and veggies before 8 a.m. It makes you feel ready to take on the world!

You may wonder if buying all these fruits and vegetables and turning them into juice isn’t somehow wasteful and expensive. It depends on how you look at it. My grocery bill has certainly gone up, but I don’t know if that’s because of the additional produce I’m buying or just the state of the economy. What I am noticing is that I actually USE the vegetables I buy now.

I used to put them in the crisper until they disintegrated into brown juice in their plastic bags. Some comedian – I think George Carlin – said it best, “Why do they call that drawer “the Crisper”? They should call it “the Rotter,” because that’s what happens in there.”

So far, I’ve made juice concoctions from various combinations of carrots, celery, beets (who would have thought beet juice could be delicious?), pineapple, lime, oranges, grapefruit, apples and mangoes.

I thought maybe the love affair would diminish a bit recently when I tried a recipe from my trusty “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Juicing” that recommended mixing kale with carrots. I was a little suspect after I threw in the leafy greens and a vile squid ink began dripping out the spigot. But it was fine. Certainly better than V-8.

Here’s another cool thing about using a juicer: You can layer the colors. Put in all your celery for a green layer, carrots for an orange layer, beets for a red layer and so on. I don’t know why it makes me happy to drink a rainbow-colored glass of juice, but it’s probably an inner child thing.

Regardless, I should warn you that a juicer may be a gateway to more extensive culinary experiments. I recently found myself browsing through an online cooking catalog for – gasp! – fun, and before I could stop myself, I had ordered a good knife for chopping vegetables. At the last minute, I threw a blender in my online cart as well.

Today, juice. Tomorrow, smoothies. Who knows where I’ll be in another 40 years?

GRAPEFRUIT, ORANGE AND PINEAPPLE JUICE
From “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Juicing” by Ellen Brown
Serves: 2
Prep time: less than 10 minutes
2 grapefruit
2 oranges
1/4 pineapple
1/4 lemon
Peel grapefruit and cut into sixths. Peel oranges and quarter. Cut pineapple off rind and into 2-inch cubes. Peel lemon.
Push grapefruit, oranges, pineapple and lemon through the juicer, and process until juiced. Stir well and pour juice into two glasses.

Lynn Tryba is a freelance writer who lives in Peterborough.