VIRGIN MARY/BLOODY MARY

What You Need

3 ripe tomatoes
1 stalk of celery – leaves and all if they are fresh
1 medium carrot
60 ml (2 ounces) of vodka (optional)
A dash of Tabasco or Worcester Sauce
Salt and Cajun or grated horseradish, seasoning and freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup of crushed ice

Here’s How

Place the celery, tomatoes and carrot in a juice extractor. Then mix with the vodka if you are using it, season and serve immediately to preserve the living enzymes in the juice and the flavor. You can also make this drink in a blender without the ice, but this makes it more a spooning drink than a drinking one.

In Chinese medicine tomatoes are considered to have a cooling effect on the body and to be great for calming fever. Their sweet/sour flavor is believed to relieve dryness, to tonify the stomach, cleanse the liver and purify the blood. Even though the tomato is an acid fruit, when you eat it or drink it alkalizes the blood. Always use ripe tomatoes. This drink bears little resemblance to the familiar bloody Mary made with canned tomato juice. You can serve it virgin style – straight up – or add a little vodka to give it a kick. I like to pour it over crushed ice in the summer and serve it in a flared, rimmed, long-stemmed goblet. In winter I serve it at room temperature in a tall glass.

Tomatoes Reborn

For generations tomatoes were thought of as a poisonous fruit. In fact they were once called mala insana – ‘unhealthy fruit’. As far back as the 17th century they were thought to provoke not only upset stomachs but a sense of loathing in anyone who ate them. As it turns out, only the French, who refer to tomatoes as pommes d’amour or ‘love apples’, got it right. Far from being poisonous, tomatoes are rich in health-enhancing compounds, including high levels of vitamin C, carotenoids and many other, probably as yet unidentified, compounds. Two recent research projects – one carried out in Harvard University and the other at the Cancer Research Centre in Hawaii – showed that men and women who eat large quantities of tomatoes are less than half as likely to die of cancer than those who don’t; and second, in people who had cancer already, eating good quantities of tomatoes doubled participants’ survival time. No-one as yet knows exactly why this is, except that tomatoes are very rich in lycopene, one of the powerful, plant-based antioxidants, which improves mental as well as physical functioning and at the same time reduces the risk of degenerative diseases. Tomatoes also contain good quantities of glutathione, another potent antioxidant which helps enhance immune functioning, slow down premature aging and even helps prevent macular degeneration. These are but a few reasons to add more to your daily fare.