Preparing for a Faster Recovery – Freezing Juice

Another surgery scheduled for 2 weeks from today. Just enough time to really get me anxious, but also just enough time to make sure I’m actually prepared this time. I hope. One thing I’m doing is making up juice in advance so that I will have plenty on hand during recovery. I really missed my fresh juice while recovering last time and I really felt like if I’d had it things might have gone better. Granted, part of that was simply a matter of not having “easy to eat” food on hand when Paul was at work. So, we are working on that too.

I’d been planning to make some juice ahead and freeze it and had bought some Mason jars for just that purpose. However, Paul kinda freaked out at the idea of freezing glass (evidently that can be dangerous), but I remember my Grandma freezing jam in mason jars and it wasn’t an issue. So, it’s been a debate around here since last week. His answer was to re-use plastic water bottles to freeze juice. We bought the water (It’ll get drank eventually), but I already had the Mason jars and I wanted to at least test this out. So, at the end of last week I froze a couple of jars of juice. The other issue, was I wasn’t sure just how well the juice would freeze. Would I even want to drink it after I’d frozen it and then thawed it out?

This morning, I have my answer. I pulled a jar of Green Juice out of the freezer yesterday and let it thaw in the fridge. It still had a huge chunk of ice in this this morning when I pulled it out and let it sit on the counter for a good hour or so before attempting to drink it. When I poured it into my cup (after shaking it up really well) there was still a big iceberg. But, the flavor was great. Actually, the flavor tastes almost fresher (how can that be?) than when I drink it fresh. I’m not usually a fan of drinking my juice cold (I prefer it straight out of the juicer), but I’m thinking from now on if I’m going to drink it cold, I’d rather have it frozen than simply sitting in my fridge overnight.

So, we’ve solved two issues. 1. Yes, the Mason jars freeze just fine. Just don’t fill them all the way to the top. 2. The Green Juice also freezes just fine.

Now, to find some other easy to eat foods that fit in my diet.Edit: That Green Juice in the front was evidently overly full and the glass broke when it froze. The other two are fine (the carrot/orange juice there has been in for almost a week and is fine). So, if you are freezing juice in a glass jar PLEASE be very careful to leave plenty of room for expansion.