Juice Pulp Makeover: Raw Carrot Cake Crunchies

I figured "Juice pulp makeover" was a much nicer title than "Re-using your juice pulp" or "What to do with the chunky stuff left in your juicer." Call it my precursor to Earth Day recipe. But wait... Me? Juicing? For those of you know me or have been following me for a while, I'm not the biggest fan of juicing. There's something about separating the sugars from the fibres from your fruit that I'm not totally convinced with (in terms of what it means to eat the most naturally possible), but I've heard enough good things that I can be swayed when it's cleansing season.

Being me, I can never just throw away all the stuff that comes out the other end of the juicer. While I'd have no problem chucking a pack of Oreos if a friend forgot them at our place (I just realized I don't think I have any friends that eat Oreos... hmm), I can't justify throwing out something that is still food to me. And of course, by throwing out, I mean composting it in our yard. This is exactly why I don't mind identifying with the "crunchy" label.

Anyway, a day of juicing left me with a lot of carrot and apple pulp, especially after a fantastic carrot-apple-celery-ginger juice. Since you also know how much I love carrot cake, there was only one thing to do in my mind... raw carrot cake crunchies! Plus, seeing as how I've been eating non-solid foods for about 4 days now (green smoothies, and juices), the idea of making a crunchy granola-like topping for my smoothies seemed really tempting.

Clearly, I'm not the only one who thinks about this stuff. Funny enough, Gina at Choosing Raw also just wrote about re-using nut and juice pulp here for very much the same reasons. Yay, for fellow raw foodie vindication...

I also realized I have already posted a recipe also attempting to recycle my carrot juice pulp a while ago. However, now that I'm a more seasoned raw food maker this one is way better (and of course, the ingredients are estimated, since that's how I roll.)

Carrot Cake Crunchies

1-2 C of carrot or carrot-apple juice pulp*

1-1.5 C finely ground coconut flakes/coconut butter**

1 tablespoon of liquid sweetener (I used raw honey)

pinch of salt

cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg to taste

handful of dried cranberries (or raisins)

handful of chopped raw walnuts (or almonds)

1. Mix the first five ingredients in a  mixing bowl.

2. Add in dried fruit and nuts.

3. Make sure the mix loosely sticks together, 

so you can have bigger and smaller crunchy pieces.

4. Place onto a dehydrator tray, and dehydrate at 115 for about 12 hours (or overnight).

*I did have ultimately have celery in my juice too but I emptied the carrot and apple pulp our of my juicer before I juiced the celery. There may have also been some ginger in that mix, but that was acceptably yummy.

** I often make my own coconut butter by blending coconut flakes in a high speed blender (aka. the dry blender of my Vitamix), this time I just blended it about halfway through the process, so half of it was finely ground and the other half was more buttery so it would make the crunches stick together.