With summer in full swing, what’s more refreshing, healthful and satisfying than a fresh fruit or vegetable juice? Today I welcome Sean Carey to the Cowgirls & Collard Greens stage for the very first time. Sean is lover of healthy juices and is the co-founder of Raw Juice Cleanse Recipes. Today Sean is sharing a new recipe that he created special just for us and the recipe includes collard greens! Can I get a yeehaw!?! I can’t wait for you to try this simple, delicious and colorful juice. Cheers!
xo, Kayle
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Summer has finally begun, and when it’s hotter than all get out, there’s nothing better than an ice cold glass of juice. I know that the collard green growing season has come to an end in most parts of the country, but there’s usually quite a bit of it still sitting on the shelves at your local grocery store.
I thought, what else would be more fitting, when writing a guest post for cowgirls and collard greens, than to make a sweet and delicious summer juice recipe that included a bit of collard green juice. Besides, I usually like adding, at minimum, a bit of green in all of my juice recipes. Why not make your nutrition delicious?
Before I get to the ingredients along with a few juicing tips, I thought I’d show an image of the finished product. In the spirit of summer, I decided to make this juice recipe right on my front porch!
Carrots & Collard Greens Juice Recipe
Ingredients: (yields 22 ounces of juice)
9 Carrots
3 Collard Green Leaves
2 Oranges
If you want something more precise:
(4 cups chopped) Carrots = 10 ounces of juice
(2 cups chopped) Collard Greens = 3 ounces of juice
(2 and 1/2 cups sliced) Oranges = 9 ounces of juice
The reason I included a simple recipe and a more precise recipe is that not all vegetables and fruit come in the same size. For example, there’s a huge range of different sized carrots out there, and when I say add 9 carrots, who knows how much juice you’ll be getting from the 9 carrots that you happen to have at the time?
I sure don’t, and you probably don’t either. Hence, the “if you want something more precise” section of all of the juice recipes I do was born. 🙂
This way if you want to do the recipe exactly how it was done in the first place, you can juice each ingredient until you have the amount of juice listed, or you can measure out the ingredient by chopped or sliced cups and then juice it up. Either way, you’ll come up with roughly the amount of juice that I listed at the bottom of the recipe.
A Tip For Getting Your Oranges Ready Quickly
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always gotten a bit impatient when I’m working at peeling an entire orange away! I know I can cut it in half and then peel open the sides and take it out, but the whole process just seems to get my hands sticker than anything, and sometimes I end up with chunky looking orange slices.
One day I happened upon a video where someone simplified the whole process, and I swear it was like harps were playing in the background or something because I never thought opening an orange up could be so easy!
It’s as easy as this. Slice a small piece off both the top and the bottom of your orange. It looks like this.
Then you just get your thumb underneath the peel so that the peel is in between your thumb and the rest of your fingers. Then you just start working your thumb under while you pull it up and off. For me, it usually comes off as one or two large pieces, but sometimes I end up with a few little stragglers that I have to pull off separately.
Other Tips
I used my masticating juicer when I made this recipe, so I juiced the oranges first. This allowed me to run the hardier vegetables (in this case the carrots and collards) through the juicer afterwards which pushed through all of the remaining orange pulp.
If you have a centrifugal juicer, you’ll want to do it the other way around. You’ll also want scrunch up your collard greens in your hand into as tight of a ball as possible before you run it through your centrifugal juicer. This will allow you to get as much of the juice from them as possible.
These are just some little tricks I’ve learned over time that help to get the most out of the vegetables and fruit I’m juicing.
Keep A Mason Jar On-Hand
Whether I’m going to actually drink my juice out of the mason jar or not, I almost always have a mason jar with me when I’m juicing.
Mason jars seal up nice and keep the juice and its nutrients as fresh as possible. I’m kind of a nutrition nut, so I like to give my juice every little bit of help that I can to retain as much of the nutrients that were originally in it. When you’re juicing, sometimes things in life come up that interrupt your flow, or it simply takes time in between the juicing of each ingredient.
I don’t like leaving my juice sitting out. I just start picturing all of my happy little nutrients being oxidized or wasted away by heat and light.
Enemies of the nutrients inside of our juice = air, heat, and light.
So if I know I’m about to have to take a break or that I need to wash the next ingredient or chop it up, I’ll pour what juice I have into my mason jar and then put it away in the fridge.
No air to oxidize it, and no heat or light to reduce its nutritional content.
Here’s a picture of me doing exactly this after I’d juiced the orange and carrot part of the juice today.
Health Benefits of this Carrots & Collards Juice Recipe
Collard greens contain both iron and chlorophyll. Both of these are good for anyone who is suffering from anemia or is just looking to improve the health of their blood. Collard greens are also a cruciferous vegetable; in the same family as kale, broccoli, and cabbage. These vegetables are known for their amazing anti-cancer properties.
The oranges in this juice recipe provide citric acid and vitamin C. These both help to make more of the kind of iron that’s in vegetables and fruits (non-heme iron) available for our body to absorb. If you’re looking to get more iron out of your plant foods, be sure to include something with vitamin C and if possible citric acid along with it.
If you include a citrus fruit like oranges, you get a double boost of iron because it contains both of these. Lemons and limes are a good low sugar substitute for diabetics or pre-diabetics.
Carrots contain high levels of vitamin A and other antioxidants. This combination has been found to be helpful for our skin and can in fact protect it from damage from the sun. A good thing to be aware of in the summertime! Carrots are also known to prevent strokes and to prevent cell damage done to our bodies, thus, slowing down the aging process.
You’ll get all of these benefits and more. Plus, as an added benefit this juice tastes delicious! 🙂
I hope you’ll enjoy this juice recipe as much as I did!
About Sean Carey:
Sean is a juicing specialist and currently a college student majoring in Sustainable Horticulture. Through juicing, healthy diet, and lifestyle change he has been able to not only lose close to 100 pounds, but also rid himself of the auto-immune disease, psoriatic arthritis. His partner Liisa and himself created the website Raw Juice Cleanse Recipes in order to share their love of juicing and juice recipes with other people.
You can connect with him on their Facebook page, their Twitter account, their Pinterest page, or his personal Google+ account.
If you are going to start any juice cleanse diet, you should consult a professional nutritionist!