Shop Smart: Banking Summer Vegetables

I’ve got too many damned farm- and garden-grown vegetables in my house. But I’m not sweating it. I’m actually loving it. That’s because I’ve got my freezer game on lock.

Not freezing local, organic summer veggies while they’re cheap and plentiful? Come on. Stay woke.

My Vegetarian Secret: Lao Gan Ma

The month o’ vegetable bounties is upon me! I’m drowning in gifts and CSA shares of squash, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes. TBH, I’m pretty happy about it.

When it comes to cooking the veg bounty, some folks have time and $$$ to attend to protracted recipes filled with a million ingredients.

For the rest of us, there’s Lao Gan Ma.

Keeping Fresh Basil Happy for Weeks

Okay. By “weeks” I mean up to 10-12 days or so. But hey, it beats my old record of 2-3 days! 

The pros tell me to keep basil on the counter, stems trimmed and in fresh water, with a bag over top to keep leaves from drying out. I’ve been doing this all summer and it works, man. It works! No more slime basil sitting in the fridge! Yaaaay. 

Beginner Tips for Cheap, Fast, and Easy Juicing

New England in January: Not exactly the Garden of Eden. We’re stuck with mealy cold-storage apples and heaps of boring root vegetables.

If you’re like me, you’re doing your damnedest to avoid the bananas from Peru and tomatoes from Mexico all harvested green, shipped around the world and ripened with ethylene gas. We know that the labor conditions for food workers in subaltern countries are intolerable, carbon emissions for shipping a vegetable around the world are irresponsible, and to top it all off, the food doesn’t taste as good as local, vine-ripened, in-season produce. So, folks like you and me buy a few California oranges and fair trade Costa Rican bananas and try to make up for it by loading up on those tiresome locally-grown root veggies.  

Well, together we can dial the drama down. There’s a way to eat local veggies without pouting. He-llo, juice!

I love my juicer. It’s a whiz at perking me up. I can’t drink caffeine, but a glass of juice is–I’m serious–pretty good at waking you up. And it helps me get my vittles in.

There are a lot of sites out there with long lists of pro-tips on juicing and buying a juicer. I’ve included some of the more popular ones below. Here, I thought I’d share some of the advice and lessons I’ve gathered over the last two years of juicing and talking about it with others. From me to you. One juicer to another.

If you want a crazyfancyexpensivecomplicated juicer or if you think of yourself as an expert-level health nut, this post isn’t for you. This is for the average, healthy-ish (as in “my palate is still agreeable to Cheetos and Lucky Charms”), time-crunched, thrifty folks.
Tips for Becoming a Juicer: Novice Edition

1. Juicing doesn’t have to involve a mountain of extra produce. Instead, try buying just one extra apple/orange and combining it with leftover local veggies you have in your fridge this week (this is something my juicing friend Kerri does a lot). If you have some kale, a carrot, and an apple, that’s a pretty cool juice. Or beet, orange, mixed greens. Or pear + sweet potato. You get the idea.
2. Juicing doesn’t have to take a ton of time. Usually, the night before I’m thinking of making breakfast juice, I just cut up the produce into giant hunks and put them in a covered bowl in the fridge. I do it while I’m packing my lunch. In the morning, I just grab the produce and jam it in the juicer. No big.
3. I can’t possibly say this loud enough: Wash your fucking juicer out as soon as you juice. Raw produce pulp becomes cement over time. I am always guilty of leaving dishes in the sink but I have learned the hard way that I can’t slack on cleaning the juicer.
4. You don’t scrub and soak and soap juicer parts. You just rinse them really well in scalding hot water. So, it’s not going to take as long to clean as you’re imagining.
5. If you aren’t composting, throw your pulp out by first putting it in a grocery bag and tying it shut before you put it in your garbage can. There, I just saved you a really stinky and fruit-fly filled kitchen. No one tells you this shit on the fancy green-living blogs, but raw pulp thrown directly in the trash and left there for a few days smells abysmal.
6. Store or use your juicer next to the sink. This keeps you from dragging a pulp-heavy, cord-danglin’, dripping juicer across your kitchen to clean it.
7. Yes, you can compost juicer pulp. And yes, you can make dog treats out of it, too.
8. If you were wondering, you can’t make a ton of juice and drink it all week. Raw, juiced food has a short shelf life. You’re not Odwalla, dude. You’re just a gal with a teeny countertop juicer and zero preservatives. So don’t worry about getting a huge juice reservoir. And in the event that your pulp bucket fills up, you can always dump it out and keep juicing. That is a five-second process.
9. There are two main types of juicers: Centrifugal (squeezes the juice out by spinning it) and masticating (“chews up” the food and separates the pulp from the juice). Knowing the differences before you start shopping will save you a lot of headaches. Masticating juicers are generally way more expensive but they claim to extract more of the nutrients and fiber. After reading a lot of reviews and opinion pieces, you’ll probably conclude like me that either juicer is fine. Either way, you’re getting more raw food nutrition than you would without juicing.
10. Beginners will likely opt for a centrifugal juicer because they are generally cheaper, smaller and easier to operate and clean. For the record, I got this centrifugal juicer and I love it.
11. Pay attention to how many components a juicer has. Things like external pulp buckets and extra reservoirs are handy but remember you have to cart this thing to the sink, clean all those individual pieces, then it has to be stored somewhere.
12. Look for reviews that say the machine is easy to clean. Cleaning the juicer is the number one reason my ex-juicing friends became ex-juicers.
13. The internal pulp bucket: Unless you’re juicing a gallon of juice (meaning you’re going to drink a whole gallon in one day), I’d get a juicer that collects pulp inside the machine. This keeps the machine smaller and reduces extra parts.
14. Make sure your juicer has a big-ol’ feeder tube. Look for a tube that could fit a medium apple. Not having to micro-chop every last veggie makes things quicker and easier.

For more input you might want to check out Reboot with Joe’s juicer comparison guide and neuroscientist and food writer Summer Tomato has a great guide on what factors to consider before buying (or not buying) a juicer.

And for a great everyday winter juice that’s local and seasonal (to New England), try one of my favorite standbys:

Morning Baller

• One apple (skin and all)
• Two carrots (tops and all)
• One beet (greens and all)

Or visit the killer JuiceRecipes.com or TheJuiceNut.com (I looove these sites) for more ideas.