Carrot Juice and Veggie Popsicles

I have a good friend that come through and visits me about once a month. He lives in another state and I am on the travel path for his job. He told me on one of his visits that where he lives, they sell carrots by the 25 lb bag for less than $10. I couldn't believe it but he said they have lots of horses in the area so they get the bag of seconds for cheap to feed to the horses.

I asked him if he would be willing to get me a bag on his way through next time. Last week, he brought me a 25 pound bag of carrots for $8. We roast carrots almost every Sunday. I haven't juiced them in the past because they are more than $1 a pound so it doesn't seem cost effective to juice them. I have juiced fresh grown carrots but don't get many of those either so this was a great blessing. Carrots and apples together are one of the best immune boosters naturally you can get from food.

The carrots were almost all great. I would say that one in 20 was odd shaped or split. These were the worst of it and not many at that. However, when you are going to juice them, it really doesn't matter what shape the carrot takes. I put the carrots in gallon Ziploc bags and gave some to my sister that lives near me.

I had some apples that were getting older and started to wrinkle so I thought they would be great juiced as well. I learned awhile ago that when I juice, I like to keep the pulpy stuff so I always wash and clean the veggies and fruit I juice so that the pulp is clean. I cored the apple as well before juicing them.

Celery has lots of natural salt so I added a few stalks of celery to each glass. The girls weren't thrilled about having to try it but they took it well. I actually enjoyed the flavor and thought that adding a dash of Cayenne pepper would give it a zing. Or, you could just throw in some fresh hot pepper.

Once the juice is made, I poured it into these little Popsicle makers you can buy at the dollar store. I really enjoyed the Popsicles but my girls weren't so excited about them because they said Popsicles aren't supposed to taste like vegetables. I have made several flavors of the Popsicles but I preferred the carrot/apple juice to the berry one I made because there was no pulp in the carrot juice one. The berry one had lots of texture.

I asked the girls if I added pineapple juice to the carrot juice pop if they would have liked it better and they thought that they would because it wouldn't taste so much like carrots. They like carrots but just not frozen is what they said.

This is what the pulp looked like and I will write about how I use that tomorrow.