A cool and refreshing way to drink your veggies: this easy homemade tomato vegetable juice is like V8 juice, but better (recipe here).
I have a
sheep farmer friend who recently told me that she swears by Campbell's V8 juice when working out in the heat. She says it's more rejuvenating than drinking water or Gatorade and literally makes the difference between wanting to keel over and being able to keep going for hours.
This is the kind of stuff I need to know.
What could be even better than V8? Homemade V8! Or
in this case V4, though you can add more vegetables, such as beets, carrots, tomatoes, or sweet peppers, if you like. Either way, this easy to make vegetable tomato juice will blow that V8 away. Did you know V8 juice is mostly made from water and tomato paste and salt?
Last week we put up
another 180 bales of hay, on one of those insanely hot and humid days where you're drenched in sweat just walking across the farmyard, and it seems impossible that the air can be so amazingly still.
I couldn't conjure up a breeze—because there's apparently some law that says all air movement must stop while you're picking up hay—but before heading out into the hayfield, I found enough tomatoes in the garden to whip up a quick batch of
this homemade vegetable tomato juice.
It definitely helped. And it also tasted delicious.
I'm sure V8's revitalizing abilities have something to do with the frightening amount of sodium it contains (because you lose so much while sweating), so this time I doubled the salt in my recipe.
I also used the
Oxo Good Grips food mill I finally bought fall after lusting after one for two years.
(Thanks to all of you who let me know how much you like yours!) I
love it. It is so easy to use and clean, the non-stick legs work great, and the three different sized grinding discs are awesome.
To make this healthy, flavorful juice (recipe here), all you do is chop everything up and toss it into a pot, simmer until soupy, then put it through a food mill. It's the perfect way to make use of overripe, imperfect, or just plain ugly tomatoes, which you can sometimes find for a deal at farmers' markets.
And thankfully you don't have to be heading out into the hayfield to enjoy it.
