All About Sprouts

Sprouts are an amazing vegetable full of tons of vitamins, nutrients, and other good stuff. In fact, they have even more nutrients than normal salad greens. Plus, they're just plain delicious. Normally, sprouts tend to be a rather hard-to-find, expensive item at the grocery store, but the good news is, it is super easy and a lot of fun to grow them yourself at home. All you need are a few simple supplies and a little extra counter space.                                                                      

You will need:

• A sprouting lid and jar (we got sprouting lids that screw onto wide-mouth canning jars. A quart size jar is best.)
• Sprouting seeds: Some seeds are treated to prevent them from sprouting, so make sure you get special seeds that say they are made for sprouting. Probably organic ones too.

Here's what you do:

• Put about one or two tablespoons of seeds in your jar, depending on the size of the seeds. The smaller the seeds, the fewer you will put in the jar. Your package of seeds should tell you how many. Fill the jar with some water and let the seeds soak for about 8 hours.
• After the seeds have soaked, tip the jar upside down to let the water drain out. Rinse and drain the seeds, leaving the jar in a bowl at around a 45 degree angle.
• Rinse and drain the seeds about two or three times a day. If they start to smell or get moldy, you're probably not rinsing them often enough or draining them well. If this happens, throw them out and start over again. But as long as you rinse and drain your seeds well, you shouldn't have to worry about bacteria forming.
• The seeds should begin to sprout within 24 hours, and they will be ready to eat in about 3-5 days. When they're almost done, leave them in a sunny spot to "green up" a bit.
• Keep your sprouted sprouts in the refrigerator for up to a week, rinsing them once a day to keep them fresh (if you leave them out, they'll keep on growing!)

Here's a series of photos I took showing how the seeds sprout. The seed mix is called "Crunchy Bean Mix", and since the seeds are really big, they take the longest of all to sprout. However, as you can tell, they're still ready in about 4 days.

Dry sprouting seeds, ready for soaking

After about 9 hours of soaking (soaking them for an hour or two longer won't hurt them)

24 hours later

After about 30 hours

After two days, you can see the sprouts have really begun to sprout!

Three and a half days later, the leaves of the sprouts have developed. This is when I like to put them in some light so they can get greener and even more nutritious!

The sprouts were ready on the fourth day, but I don't have any photos of that. Sprouts never seem to last very long in our house!

I hope you enjoyed this post on sprouts! If you have any more questions that I didn't answer in this post, just leave a comment below.

~Rachel

The Thrill of Breakfast

   If you're like my sister, you most likely love cooking and experimenting with new recipes. Sometimes, it probably seems like you're cooking up a new experiment every day, from homemade bread to homemade yogurt to homemade cheese that more than slightly resembles a brain (yeah, that’s kind of a long story...)

     But not everyone is like my sister.

     If you are like me, you don’t really like cooking. Oh, you like eating all right. In fact, you might like it just a little too much. So much, in fact, that despite your distaste for cooking, you find yourself in the kitchen every morning, searching for something delicious to have for breakfast.

     For me, smoothies are one of my most favorite things to have for breakfast, as well as other breakfast foods. They're quite easy to make, and they taste so good. There are literally hundreds of different ways to make them, and thousands of possible ingredients.

     We always seem to have various old food sitting around our house, and smoothies are a great way to use up that old cranberry sauce that’s been sitting in the fridge for 6 months. (Let’s just say we have had some very interesting smoothies in the past.) I have this basic recipe that I like to be creative with:

Sprouts and flax seed. What could be better

• Some liquid (I usually use milk, but you could use any nut milk, fruit juice, ect.)
• The “base”. I usually use some fruit like strawberries, blueberries, peaches, ect. This time, I also threw in some sprouts to get some vegetables in. Yes, this was one of those more interesting-tasting smoothies.
• “Seasoning”: cinnamon, vanilla extract, pumpkin pie spice, ect. I also love putting in about a tablespoon of flax seed. It’s surprising how much your smoothie thickens up when you add a bit of flax seed.
• “Extras”: old applesauce; that last bit of yogurt nobody wants; leftover codfish. (Then again, even the taste of a smoothie is no match for the aroma of leftover codfish)

   Well, I hope you have enjoyed this post about breakfast, one of my favorite meals of the day (my other favorite meals of the day are lunch and dinner.) Happy smoothie making!

Do you like cooking or not? What is your favorite food to make?