Recipe for delicious Green Sunshine Juice

Green Sunshine Juice (formerly called Shrek Juice!)

- the top of the morning to you!

¼ to ½ cucumber

1 stick of celery (more if you like it – I hate it (!) but it is a good source of mineral salts)

¼ to ½ lemon

¼ to ½ lime

2-3 apples

1" slice of pineapple (if fruit sugars are not contra-indicated for you)

a large handful of spinach, kale, green lettuce, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, beet tops – anything green and leafy – or a mixture of whatever you have in the fridge as long as it is green and leafy (and edible!)

If your greens are very dark and strong, you may need more lemon, lime and apple. The whole point of this juice is to get the green chlorophyll plant juice in the green leaves into your body in a readily accessible form – fresh living juice. We need to sweeten it and cut the green taste and the citrus fruits and the apples do this beautifully. If you have some pineapple to hand, that goes in well also.

We take ½ to 1 pint each of this every day and it forms a wonderful foundation of nutrition to keep you going during the day. If you have an early start, make it the night before and put it in a vacuum flask in the fridge. It is better fresh, but better old than none!

Shrek Juice = Nutritional Insurance

1 pint of this everyday will give you loads of energy, clear your skin and make you feel more inclined to take healthier options for food choices, almost without thinking.

3 of these per week and you have a 76% reduced chance of developing Alzheimer’s – which is a huge benefit. That was just from one 10-year study on juicing.

Best juicer?

Breville Café Style Juicer (JE4) Sturdy machine, lots of stainless steel makes it a strong machine. Efficient and very quick.

Philips HR1861 Pro Aluminium Juicer Good value – easy to use but not quite as durable as the JE4.

To find the cheapest seller of these machines, do your internet searches through the shopping genie - free application backed by google, yahoo and ebay: download absolutely FREE from: www.comparethebargains.com

Do the normal search and then use the "compare" button on your shopping genie toolbar and it will sort ALL your search results into the cheapest.

Probiotics can help behaviour, ADD and Asthma

We have a small sample of case studies which have shown us that just giving broad spectrum, good quality probiotics can help a range of conditions not instinctively linked to the gut.

One case was a 10 year old child with asthma. It was suggested that the dysbiosis in his gut was alerting the immune system to potential invaders, in lay terms, it had the immune system on "amber alert" as a baseline state. This meant that anything that came into his system was reacted to instead of tolerated, e.g. pollen, pet hairs etc.

After two months on daily probiotics (between 4 bn and 20 bn), his asthma attacks had dropped from two to three per week down to two to three per month. This was a very encouraging result but as a side effect, his behaviour was also much calmer and his attention span had increased.

His temper outbursts had dropped drastically and his mother reported that he did not "kick off" anywhere near as much as he had been doing prior to the probiotic treatment regime.

It is suggested by this treatment that the level of dysbiosis can greatly influence the state of reactivity generally of the whole body, physically, emotionally and mentally. With the less favourable kinds of bacteria colonising the bowel, the level of irritation and toxicity is greatly increased and the body is highly reactive to any other potential irritant.

Extrapolating from this, anybody experiencing any kind of intolerance, allergic reaction and behavioural disturbance (and this can include depression, anxiety, stress) should try a course of good quality high strength probiotics before they restort to other medicines to suppress the symptoms.

It is suggested that the seat of many problems is the gut flora - at the Taymount Clinic we have many good results from initially attending to the level of good bacteria in the gut. It is worthy of further study that some serious conditions like Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis can be affected positively by making sure the gut flora are the beneficial kind rather than the pathogenic strains.

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most elegant and efficient.

Juicing - Why should we juice?

JUICING? - WHY DO IT?


Why Juice? Why not just eat the stuff?

Loads of good reasons, here are just a few to chew on...

1. Juicing is a way of mechanically chewing up your food before you eat it. Your body is like a juice extractor, you chew the foods up so that your body can extract the nutrient-rich juice and then reject the fibre. Juicing saves your body time and energy – it is like nature’s fast food, healthy fast food. Most of us are too busy to chew properly and this has bad effects like bloating, wind, reflux etc. Juicing gets nourishment into your body in a form it can absorb quickly and easily.

2. You would not sit down to a big plate of greens and fruit for breakfast – so you would not just eat the stuff. Also, we need to eat more fruits and veggies to get the same nutrients that we used to get in our fresh food; intensive farming and long journeys to market, vast storage barns where the produce is stored, all mean that our food has lost a lot of its nutrients but the time we get them home. We should try to eat more seasonally and more locally produced foods to get more nutrients.

3. Juicing enables you to “wrap up” the less attractive taste of nutrient-rich greens and veggies in the sweet and flavourful juices of fruits making the whole thing palatable and getting nutrients inside you that you would not normally have ingested.

4. Because we don’t just eat the stuff!

But don’t we need the fibre?

Yes we do need fibre, we are not suggesting that you replace all your meals with fruit and veggie juices – just ADD the juices to your diet and eat nice high fibre meals as well. People who go on juice-only fasts often have a lot of problems with constipation so we acknowledge fully that we need fibre, probiotics and prebiotics to maintain a healthy colon. So drink your juice and eat your high fibre complex carbohydrates (wholegrain cereals and salads) too!

How much juice should we drink every day?

Studies over 10 years in Israel have shown that just one half-litre glass of green juice taken three times per week can reduce your chances of Alzheimer’s by an astonishing 76%. Think what a daily drink could do! If you get into the habit of taking a large glassful (think of a pint glass) every day and then a refreshing carroty or beetrooty or fruity cocktail for the fun of it any other time of the day, then you are boosting your daily nutrient intake way beyond what most people have in a week. 30 days on that and you will feel the energy and health improvement.

I don’t have time in the mornings to make a juice, can I do it the night before?

Yes, if you can get the juice nice and cold with some ice, put it in a flask and fill it right to the top to avoid air oxidation and keep it in the fridge until you need it, you won’t lose too many nutrients and the quality will be ok. An old juice is still better than no juice!

Which juicer is the best one to buy?

The best juicer on the market is the one that you would use every day. It is no good buying the top of the range technically brilliant machine if it doesn’t suit your lifestyle and spends most of its expensive life in the cupboard – I have been there, done that! A cheaper, less-efficient juicer that is a pleasure to use and one that you keep on the table top and use every day is a far better buy than the gleaming stainless steel beauty that costs you a month’s salary and is too complicated to clean up afterwards.

Great starter models are shown on the “Shrek Juice” leaflet. Other models of juicer are designed for multi-purpose and more advanced kitchen usage and we cover some of those in the demonstration.

Should we only juice organic foods?

In a perfect world, all produce would be organic and yes, that is the best type to buy and juice. But this is not a perfect world and organic foods cost a lot more than conventionally farmed produce. A juice made with conventional fruits and veggies is still better than no juice at all. If you have to compromise, consider that any green leafy vegetable is going to have been sprayed at least once (sometimes many times), so where you have a choice, buy green leafy veggies organically if you can and wash thoroughly all the other produce that you may have to buy conventionally grown. Make the spinach, lettuce, cabbage and kale the first choice for organic if you can; it is much easier to wash the other produce and remove pesticides and chemicals, much harder to get them off crinkly lettuce and kale leaves.

Things like avocados, bananas, oranges and coconuts etc., have thick skins so they should be ok to eat non-organic. Make choices where you can, but don’t worry about it if you can’t. It is still good to juice even if it is not organic.

I’ve got a smoothie maker – can’t I use that? What is the difference between a smoothie and a juice anyway?

Smoothies are blended fruits and vegetables with none of the fibre taken away – it is the whole fruit or veggie blended to a fine pulp and sometimes watered down with fruit juice or water to make it drinkable.

Blenders are the same thing as smoothie makers and neither one is a juicer. You really need a juicer AND a blender in the kitchen.

Stay Juicy - Stay LIVE!

For more ideas on juicing, join in one of the Juicy Workshops at Taymount Clinic - see www.taymount.com for details of the next one. Fun, information, juicy samples and take-home recipe sheet and a chance to try out various juicing machines.

Lactic Acid Pickles and Fermentation

I have now got loads of milk whey left from making kefir cheese. I have been reading up about pickling vegetables in whey instead of using vinegar. The Ancient Ones used to make preserved vegetables using whey - it is a nasty modern idea to use highly acidic pickling vinegar. The commercial manufactures use acetic acid instead of lactic acid with all its friendly bacteria. The old method meant that the foods were preserved using lactic acid and the acidophilus bacteria stopped any nasty putrefaction - they did the preserving. These days, the acetic acid kills everything - including your taste buds.

Seriously, if you eat too many pickles, it can lead to stomach ulcers. The Japanese are among the healthiest nations on the planet but they still have a very high incidence of stomach ulcers and this can lead to stomach cancer. The reason for this is the incredibly high number of pickles they eat alongside their very healthy sushi and sashimi.

So let's get back to the old methods and use whey (lactic acid teeming with friendly bacteria - especially when it is whey from making kefir), to preserve our vegetables. They are more fermented than pickled and this makes for a very gentle-on-the-tongue pickle that has an exquisite flavour and texture rather than an acid bite that the commercial pickles give you.

A mixture of shredded cabbage and carrot is called Kimchi and it is a lovely accompaniment to cold meats and fish. Cabbage alone is of course sauerkraut and we are all familiar with that. Red cabbage (Rot Kohl) is often used in Germany and Bavaria, served hot with all sorts of warm, filling winter dumplings and good stuff (remember I eat cooked foods in the winter so I do appreciate warm, rib-sticking knoedels and ham dumplings that the Austrians do so well!).

We eat a lot of sushi and sashimi (raw fish is an important source of vitamin B12 for raw foodies), at home so we often run out of the little packets of pickled ginger, so this was first on my list of new creations. I have found a lovely jumbo piece of ginger root and scraped and sliced it very thinly. I put this in a jar with whey which I have coloured using beetroot powder so it is the traditional pink colour but with no nasty chemical colourings. It is now sitting in the fridge muttering quietly. I will check it in two weeks to see if it is ready. I will let you know how it goes.

So now I still have three litres of kefir whey still left in the fridge. I have a cabbage in the cooler that seems to want to be shredded up with a carrot to make some kimchi. Trouble is, I often go to the trouble of making all this stuff and then nobody wants to eat it. Perhaps I am not doing the sell bit very well....? The question is, am I going to get around to shredding it and putting it in a jar. We will see. I really need a very clever raw recipe for something delicious to make using the kefir whey. I wish I could find a Themomix recipe for making ice cream or sorbet of some kind with the whey. I will keep looking and experimenting.

I have visions of having gluts of vegetables which I dehydrate and bottle in oil or slice thinly and pickle in whey. I have these earth-mother hallucinations of cupboards stacked full of jars and bottles of nutrition-rich preserved (RAW) foods brimming with enzymes and probiotics which will see us through the winter - organic, wholesome and yummy.

Well - first, you have a dream, then you make a plan from the dream, then you make it happen. Watch this space.

Kefir cheese and dehydrators

Dehydrator experiment went a bit wrong; the kefir curdled quite alarmingly. It grew more but it made a very acidic yogurt that I didn't like much. So we have decided that we will not use the dehydrator but keep it at room temperature but slightly warm the milk before we put it over the grains, taking the fridge chill off really. That way, we don't retard the growth whilst the milk comes up to room temperature.

I am using the curdled kefir (now reconstituted) as part of a batch set aside for making some more probiotic cheese; I love that feta-style kefir cheese. I shall have to give it a name - any suggestions?
Kefa? Fetir?

Kefir and home-made feta-type cheese

Kefir
We are growing our kefir on at astonishing rates at the moment. I have sourced unpasteurised milk from Hook and Son (thanks for that link, Janie Turner of Thermomix) and now I am happily slurping 6-8 ozs of gorgeous creamy kefir each morning.
The kefir cheese is just an amazing success. I am so proud of myself! After several revolting and probably health-risking attempts at making a probiotic cheese, I have perfected the method.

You need a large bowlful of kefir - whole milk is best but the raw milk people seem to only sell semi-skimmed, so we are making do with that. Put the whole bowlful in a cheesecloth (this is best done by simply lining a large bowl with cloth and then filling it with kefir. When it is all settled, gather up the corners of the cloth and pin them together and lift gently, hanging the whole thing just above the bowl to drain. After 24-36 hours, you will have a bowl of thin whey and a cloth full of what looks like Philadelphia cheese. The whey is great added to fresh fruit and veggie juices or used in bread making or to make the crackers mentioned below. It is also fab for enzyme-rich pickles- more about that another day.

Scrape the soft cheese into another bowl. I found that you can almost mould the cheese in your hands through the cloth, picking up all the bits stuck to the cloth as you go. Put the cheese ball into the bowl and add salt and mix well. I bought a couple of cheese moulds from the internet, there are several cheese making suppliers on ebay. I line the cheese mould with fresh clean cloth and then pop the cheese into the mould. Cover with the cloth and put the press lid in place. Then I put a heavy weight on top and watch the last of the whey start to ooze out of the holes in the mould. I leave it to compress for a couple of days.

Turn it out of the mould - then a couple more days in the fridge and you will have a large lump of what looks and cuts like white Wensleydale and tastes like a slightly beery Feta cheese. It is just wonderful.

I put this on my dehydrated raw crackers (my version of Scan bran - email me if you would like the recipe: enquiries@taymount.com) and I feel so virtuous, it is a scandal.

Love and kefir grains to the world.
Oh, if you want some kefir grains, you can buy them on the taymount website: www.taymount.com - products - digestive aids

We are just experimenting to see if the kefir grows faster in the dehydrator - in a sealed Kilner jar to keep it from drying out of course. We already found that if you are making bread, the dehydrator is incredible for speeding up the proving and rising process. Just put a shower cap over the bowl to keep the bread dough moist.