I’ve learned over the course of the last few years (mostly thanks to farmers markets and Eatsy) that I don’t mind most fruits and vegetables if they’re masked blended into a delicious juice.

Earlier this year when I was at my aunt’s house in Connecticut she made some fresh orange & carrot juice for breakfast with a juicer. I thought it was pretty much the best thing since sliced bread and started to research juicers online. I’m not a fan of single-purpose appliances and I was also trying to REDUCE the amount of stuff in my life, not add to it, so I put it on the wishlist and carried on.

Fast forward a few more months and a series of unrelated tweets from unrelated friends got me thinking about the juicer again. Combine that with the fact that the only fruits and veggies that are out nowadays are gross things like kale and beets and I started to reconsider my original stance on the single-purpose appliances.

I remembered a $100 amex giftcard that I’d gotten a few years ago that I kept tucked in the back of my wallet because I couldn’t think of anything fun to get with it. BINGO! I found a $99 Breville juicer (this one) on Amazon and in a few clicks (yay Prime!) it was on its way to my door.

In anticipation of its arrival I hopped on FreshDirect and ordered basically one of everything from their produce section. OK. I exaggerate. But let’s just say that my fridge currently looks like I held up a farmer’s market. Apples, oranges, grapefruits, lemons, kale, celery, cucumbers, beets (yes, beets!), ginger, carrots, and who knows what else are now filling every which crevice of my fridge. Not a bad deal, actually. I’d rather have that stuff filling my fridge than a whole bunch of soda and prefab food.

The juicer arrived yesterday and I immediately set it up and started chopping up my fruits and veggies.

First up? A juice that I get from the Green Pirate truck during the summer – I think they call it their Pink Lemonade. I actually didn’t think to look up the ingredients in advance, so it turns out that I missed a few, but it was still pretty delicious!

This one had: 2 apples, 1 lemon, about 1″ of ginger and 1 small beet. (yes! BEETS!)

Fast forward about 30 mins and I went a bit overboard, making 2 other juices, at least. My kitchen looked like a war zone. There was pulp everywhere! I haven’t quite mastered my timing with getting the fruit/veggies in with the plunger quickly after and I wanted to try ALL THE COMBINATIONS!

The final product (not counting the amount of juice I drank while trying them):

From left to right:

• Juice 2: (henceforth dubbed: delicious pea soup) 2 apples, 1 lemon, ~1″ ginger, 2 stalks of celery, 1 stalk of kale (wasn’t sure how strong it would be). I think the pink color comes from the leftover beets at the bottom of my pitcher. Not going to lie, Juice 2 kind of looked like poop when it first came out of the juicer, but it tasted DELICIOUS. It’s all separated in this photo and looks much more pleasant!
• Juice 1: attempt at the green pirate truck pink lemonade (I forgot the cucumber! and used a lemon instead of a lime)
• Juice 3: 1 apple, 1 orange, 4 stalks celery, a bunch of kale, 1 cucumber, a bunch of baby carrots, 1 lemon, ~1″ ginger. This one was a former coworker’s recipe (Hi Jenny!) and it originally tasted a bit too vegetable-y for my taste. The original recipe called for half a lemon but I added the 2nd half in and was able to drink it. It produced about 3x the amount of juice as the previous 2 so I think I’ll be drinking this one for a while.

So that’s the first bit of my juice adventure. I swear I used oranges in something else so maybe there’s another juice that I drank down without even realizing. I’ve read and heard that these juices don’t keep well so perhaps by the time you’ve read this I’ll have finished them ALL and will be on to my next attempt! Leigha may be coming over this weekend for a juicing extravaganza. I get the feeling there’s a lot of juice in my future…