How My Efforts to be Healthy Turned Into Dessert

So a few months back Andrei and I got really into the idea of juicing. We talked about it non-stop while we were still in Moscow, “As soon as we get home we are buying a juicer and we are going to be the healthiest people on the planet and lose weight and get fit and start exercising all the time and take walks in the park and try all these cool juices and be amazing! Oh YEAH!”.

Buy a juicer we did. Juice we did. But the excitement sort of wore off when we saw how little juice we got out of some fruits and how much clean up was involved. Not to mention you shouldn’t really store the juice for very long because then the awesome nutrients sort of evaporate. So it really is an every day activity. An every day activity that I was going to do every morning for my darling husband. If I wasn’t part of the working world, I thought I should at least get up early and make a lovely juice/breakfast for my hubby. I don’t think I have to explain how that plan went.

Anyway, we still juice ocassionally, and I am still totally in favor of the idea. And the juicer is still in the kitchen – which is a good sign (once it resides in the basement, forget it). I love how natural and delicious the fresh juice is. It doesn’t taste like there are other secret ingredients in it – oh right, because there aren’t! One of the juice combinations I like, which I discovered at a random cafe in Kiev (Ukraine), is pineapple-fennel-pear-mint. I had problems keeping the mint in the juicer (it usually just gets spit right out, even after trying to roll it up into a hole in the fennel or pear), so I would usually eliminate it. The flavor was still good. Anyway, I recently bought a fennel bulb, a pineapple and two pears for the juice, but as a result of Andy leaving for Moscow for a solo trip and me being incredibly lazy, the pineapple was eaten plain, the fennel rotted in my fridge and the pear turned into a tart for a Labor Day picnic. I shake my head in shame that I can’t keep up with the juicing efforts, but my house smells so delicious right now that I’m not sure how upset about it I really am.

I used this incredibly simple tart recipe that I found on another blog, ambrosiabaking.com.

I recently watched Food, Inc. (a MUST FOR EVERYONE) and have perused homemade food books so my next efforts are to “buy only grass-fed beef and antibiotic-free and cage-free eggs and make my own everything, and plant a garden, and maybe even have my own chickens, and join my sister in the fight for having food with GMOs labelled, and get the right farmers subsidized and can jam and other veggies, and have bees, and be amazing! Oh YEAH!”…I’ll let you know how that goes.