Breville Juice Fountain Elite: juicy fresh happiness

One of the coolest new toys in my loft is my juicer. Just purchased from Williams-Sonoma last week, I have been experimenting like a woman possessed.

This all started a month or so ago when I was detoxing myself. Entire month of January without wheat, dairy, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, red meat. Spending time on Oprah.com, as I love to do, I saw her "green drink" assumably concocted by Dr. Oz. Now, there is a lot of discussion going on in her boards about what the ingredients really are (I'm going with the above link) and whether or not they meant juicer instead of blender (they did). Either way, I just thought the thing looked so damned delicious I wanted to try it.

Then inspiration struck again when I visited Chicago a few weeks ago. In a great little breakfast joint, I had their apple/carrot/celery juice. I credit it solely with curing my first post-detox hangover.

Thusly inspired, I did a ton of online comparison shopping and then finally bought the beast. Then I started researching a little bit more on organic fruits and veggies - which were the most important to buy vs. which I could get away with being conventionally grown. (Here's a great resource for that information.) And I also have a little ace up my sleeve: across the street from our building sits a St. Paul institution. Which usually frightens me. See, Eisenberg's Market has been selling groceries and produce downtown for decades. But today, they tend towards "scratch and dent" or stuff that's nearing its expiration, all of which is trucked in daily from SuperTarget and other local grocery stores. Trust me, I hear those bloody refrigerated trucks unloading their goods in the wee hours of the morning. But one store's almost-expired organic produce is a girl's juicing goldmine.

I'm careful to wash everything with plain water and scrub things like carrots and celery with a stiff brush. This week I've tried:

• 2 apples + 2 celery stalks + 4 skinny carrots + 3/4" ginger (2 servings)
• 1 ruby red grapefruit + 1 thick pineapple spear + 1 t. Penzey's vanilla sugar
• 2 apples + 2 skinny carrots + 1 celery stalk (1 serving)

I also picked up a pretty book called "The Top 100 Juices" and can't wait to try out a couple of those recipes as well. But next, Oprah's drink is on my list. And let's not kid ourselves, I have a watermelon margarita on my mind too. Because detox is over, people.

Green Tip: The resulting pulp goes right into a ziploc in my fridge (with all my other organic matter) and added to my mom's compost pile. Which then becomes happy fertilizer in her garden. Which will grow beautiful tomatoes (and other items) which then I will steal in the middle of the night in July. Shhhh.