Kid juices
A good rule of thumb is starting with a cucumber or celery base (or another high water content veggie), adding leafy greens, citrus, and any extras. Really you can make your green juice with anything that fits your nutritional needs or taste buds! Typically, I use it as an opportunity to use up the produce in my fridge or whatever looks good in the moment. Just like special candy (vitamins), and special tent (crib canopy). After helping me wash all the produce, Josh likes to help feed it into the juicer and push the plunger down to feed it through, followed excited squeals while they dance around waiting for me to get it ready for them. Getting ready to make “special juice” is an exciting event for them! Honestly, I’ve found that calling almost anything special makes them excited to try it. We use our amazing learning tower (told you it was a must have item for baking and more!), and pull it right up to the counter where the juicer stands. I had them help with washing them in the sink at home, and then came the juicing! We started at the grocery store, We would pick out the produce we needed and talk about what it was, the colors, and what we would use it for. I decided to get my kids involved in the juicing process to save me time, help them learn about fruits & vegetables and healthy eating, and get them excited about drinking it. My amazing Breville juicer is one of my favorite appliances, but its not an easy “toss in the dishwasher” type of gadget like a blender. In reality, its not the juicing part that takes long, but the clean up. Now I needed to find the time to juice for the kids (maybe for myself too). It completely changed my view on food as medicine. If you haven’t yet seen the documentary Sick, Fat & Nearly Dead, you need to. My juicer had a daily workout, and I made sure I was always drinking some type of concoction every day. In my pre-kid life, I was a juicing fanatic. When my daughter was told she had a low iron count at her 2 year check up, and to eat more leafy greens, we decided to amp it up even more by making more green juice for kids. I think it helped then to learn to appreciate the taste of fresh produce without the additives. Josh usually finishes his broccoli before anything else on his plate! I made sure to introduce as much as I could with fresh produce when they were first starting solids as babies, instead of store bought purees. Honestly, both of my kids are great vegetable eaters. There are many resources for being sneaky with getting veggies hidden into foods out there! In fact, one of our favorite “sneaky” muffins is a sweet potato muffin. I’m pretty sure that most parents struggle to get enough vegetables and healthy foods into their kids’ diet.