Juice it up

I remember my first time stopping by the juice bar inside Wild Oats.

At the time I had just moved to Cincinnati, and I had never seen a juice bar before. It was just one of those granola hippie things I had heard about but never seen in real life. I scanned the seemingly endless list of juice combinations, and I couldn't find a single thing that sounded even vaguely palatable.

I told the woman at the counter it was my first time.

She suggested something with carrots (ugh!) and ginger (weird!) and beets (ew!). No thank you. Then she had me try a few samples. Everything looked about the same shade of brownish-green, almost the color of moss or mold. I held my nose while I tossed back some shots of juice.

I left with a small glass of orange juice. That's it. Nothing else. Just orange.

Now look at me.

Only a few years have passed since then, and I am insane about juicing. Just about everything in the fridge becomes juice -- green beans, garlic, melon, cabbage, grapefruit, apples, fennel, spinach, parsley. Even that combo of carrots and beets and ginger, which I now love.

There's loads of produce out there, and I can't wait to juice it all.

My typical breakfast of champions now looks like this:

A hefty pile of kale, cucumber, celery, sprouts and broccoli stems.


Within seconds it becomes this:


I swear I can feel the vitamins wooshing through my body after I drink it. It's like a million tiny electrical charges -- I call it "cells dancing," for lack of a better way to describe the sensation.

I love waking up to that in the morning.

Sometimes I even make orange juice. Funny that now it's a little bland for my taste.