Choosing a Juicer

To keep my kids healthy I have been juicing more fruits and vegetables and also blending the juice into smoothies. Fresh juices are also great to make fresh pasta sauces with. 

A juicer is not like a blender because it is specifically designed to moisture from the fibers of fruits and vegetables. Juicers work by separating the liquid inside a vegetable or fruit from its pulp. I sometimes use the pulp leftover from a juicing session to make muffins especially if I am juicing carrots or cranberries. If you want you can use a blender to make some kinds of juices but I am a purist. I also don't want to bother straining pulp from juices.

The easiest juice to create manually is from citrus fruits, which you can just squeeze into a glass from your hand or by rubbing half of the fruit over a manual citrus juicer. The best juices on the market are the high-speed electric juicers. There are four kinds – the centrifugal, the centrifugal with pulp ejector and the masticating juicer with hydraulic press. The centrifugal juice chops the fruit or vegetable up and then spins it is an interior bucket at a high speed that helps separate the juice from the pulp.  The pulp stays in the basket until you remove it. The ones that have pulp ejectors pop the pulp out of the machine through a side opening into a collection container. The most popular brands are the Olympic, Phoenix, Braun, Oster, Sanyo and Panasonic models. They can cost anywhere from $50 to $150. 

The masticating juicer is a high-speed machine that chomps up the vegetable or fruit into a paste and then presses it all through a screen to eject the juice.  Some of these juicers have hydraulic presses attached. Champion and Norwalk are well known masticating juicers. They are largely used for pressing wheat grass juice.  You can also get electric wheat grass juicers that are faster and more sophisticated and are designed to juice produce that is difficult to put through a machine normally such as sprouts, lettuce and avocadoes. 

If you are feeling old fashioned you can also make juice by hand. You can buy juicing kits in houseware and department stores that consist of inexpensive grating boards and heavy duty cloth bags.  If it is wheat grass juice that you are after you can also buy special manual wheatgrass juice grinders. Some people would rather use a manual juicer with wheatgrass juice as it is thought that high-speed juicers oxidize the sprout or green juices.

Oxidization causes the enzymes to be degraded with free radicals. To determine whether or not a juice has been oxidized during the juicing process taste it. If it has a bit of a metallic taste after you extract it then you may have bruised some of the vitamins and nutrients it contains.

Here is a good store to find a juicer.

Healthy Snacks For Kids

People thing that their kids can be fed junk food because they are young and have faster metabolisms than adults. This is not true. They are just as vulnerable to weight gain as we are.

A recent large study about kid's eating habits from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health in the United States) found that about one-third of a child's total daily calories come from desserts, pizzas and snacks.  This is why it is important to find alternative snacks for your child to eat. 

Here are some ideas for some healthy snacks: 

Trail Mix. Your kids can help you make this trail mix as part of a home cooking lesson. Simply combine coconut flakes, dried fruit, nuts, raisons, sunflower seeds and soy nuts and put them in small 'candy bags'.  Store these in the freezer until they are ready to use. 

Fruit and Dip.  Kids are natural 'dippers' and do it anyway so why not let them dip healthy things like fruit segments into a healthy homemade dip. A tasty dip is yogurt sprinkled with cinnamon. 

Frozen Grapes:  Put a bunch of grapes in the freezer and let them go rock solid. This is the healthy version of the kid's jawbreaker that you used to buy in candy stores!  Teething kids or kids with a toothache like this too! 

Vegetables and Dip.  Vegetables are harder to get kids to eat but not if you sprinkle a bit of salt of them. Combining yogurt with Ranch Style Dressing can also encourage your kids to eat more vegetables and stop begging for the big bag of potato chips.  If you are a lazy mom who hates cutting up vegetables then buy those baby carrots. 

Lean Milkshake.  With today's high-speed blenders you don't have to make a milkshake using ice cream. You can blend milk and ice together and whip it into a shake. You can also do the same with fruit and yogurt or fruit and milk to make a nutritious smoothie. 

Meat Roll Up:  Rolling up a piece of luncheon meat around a sprig of lettuce or a thin stick of cheese makes a healthy, quick and filling snack for a kid. I know a mom who calls these Kid's Cigars. 

Baby Bel Cheeses:  These are expensive but kids just love them. They are little round edam and gouda cheeses that come in bright red and yellow wax casings. The kids have to unwrap them and peel them, which makes them into a food that is more like project. The only thing about this suggestion is to remember that you are better off to peel the wax off of the cheese for younger kids. 

Cheese and Cracker Packs:  Kids see these in stores and always want them but you can make your own packs at home by putting crackers, cheese and meat in your own plastic container. This is a lot cheaper then buying these store-bought kits, which unfortunately have become like a status symbol for many kids at school.