Do you juice?

Juicing is done on a regular basis in my household which has left us with an interesting quandary. What to do with the leftover pulp? I get a lot of recipes and tips for many different things via You Tube. In my previous juicing explorations, I've found that there is a somewhat heated debate: juicing vs. blending. The benefits of both are irrefutable; extracting the whole nutrient benefits from fruits and vegetables. But the question is which method is better. When you juice, you get a smooth easy way to "drink your nutrients", but you also have some pulp leftover from whatever you juice. The amount of pulp, and therefore juice left in the pulp, depends on the quality of machine that you are using. No matter what, there is going to be some leftover.

Those who preach the gospel of blending do so because it could be said that a lot of the nutrients from the fruits and vegetables is lost in the pulp when juicing. So they prefer to throw everything into the blender so that all of the produce is used. If you have a very high quality blender, your end product will be and nice velvety smoothie. However, if your blender isn't so great, you could end up "chewing your juice" and that's unpleasant. I like both but in the case of using simply fruits and veggies, I prefer to juice. I love a great smoothie but for different applications.

But I do agree that the pulp ends up being wasted a lot and I can't help feeling like there has to be something that can be done with it. So here's my latest creation. I was making enchiladas and was hit with a stroke of genius (don't you love when that happens). I had a bowl of pulp leftover from juicing that morning. The pulp was from kale, bok choy, carrots, ginger, lemon, and apples. Most of it was kale though. So all I did was cook the pulp in a pan with some onions then mixed it with my meat mixture for the enchiladas. Viola! It was delicious, the whole family loved it. My boys even ate the leftover meat mixture by itself. How about a round of applause for sneaking in extra vitamins!