Sprouts

I just looked at my blog and saw that the last post was in August of last year!  Well, I'm back.  Today I'm going to talk to you about sprouts.  Yes, it took 7 months for me to have something to blog about, and the muse is sprouts.

Something amazing happens when a seed is soaked and sprouted.  It's like all the potential energy for that plant is released into an easily digestible form for people, packed with nutrients, vitamins, enzymes, protein, etc.

I started with mung beans, because they were easily available at the grocery store.  I soaked 2 tablespoons of mung beans in filtered water overnight.  In the morning, I rinsed them in a colander, put the colander over a bowl and covered it with a dish cloth.  Then I rinsed and repeated that twice a day until the leaves started to appear.  I don't remember how long that took, but about 2 - 4 days.  Once the leaves appear, they start to taste bitter, so at that point I put them in the windowsill to get some light and then stored them dry in the refrigerator.  The don't get as big as commercial mung bean sprouts, which are gassed.  There is no need to rinse the hulls away; they are edible.

mung bean sprouts

That was so easy and fun that I decided to try a seed blend that I got online:  broccoli, crimson clover, red radish, and alfalfa.  These I couldn't do in the colander because the seeds are so tiny.  So I soaked them overnight by putting 2 tablespoons in a jar of water covered with a mesh cloth secured with a rubber band.  I drained the water through the mesh and let the jar sit at an angle in a pot and covered it with a cloth.  To rinse, I filled the jar with water through the mesh as before and drained.  Simple.  Rinsed twice a day until the leaves grew and shed the hulls.  Then I put the sprouts in a big bowl of water and the hulls floated to the edges.  I scooped the sprouts from the middle and put them in a colander to dry and get some light before storing.

This was slightly more complicated than the mung beans, but the main problem was that the radish sprouts were way too spicy for me.  I could barely eat them, and they were all mixed together with the other sprouts.  I'm assuming it was the radish that was the culprit.  So I got some plain old alfalfa seeds and did it again.  Fortunately, David did not mind the spicy sprouts.

It was exciting to watch my little sprouts grow.  They went from boring little dots to a jar full of life!  The kids loved watching them sprout and grow.  It happens so fast that they could see it happening.  I'm taking seeds on our next campout for fresh veggies in the woods!

Lotus inspects my alfalfa sprouts