Eight Acres

I started sprouting when I read about it in Nourishing Traditions . I bought a sprouting jar with a special lid that lets you rest the jar on an angle to drain, but you don’t really need any special equipment, just a jar and some cheesecloth (or thin fabric or mesh), an elastic band and somewhere to rest it (the dish rack does a good job). My three favourite things to sprout are chickpeas (garbanzo beans), fenugreek and alfalfa. I thought I would show you some photos of my sprouting jar so you can see how quick and easy it is, and tell you how I use them. Especially for those going into winter (or yet to harvest much from a spring garden), sprouts can be a quick and cheap way to add some green to your meals, and sprouting beans can add some protein to meals without having to cook them. First the chickpeas. I just sprout these until they have little tails, and that only takes 2-3 days, then they are ready to use. Day 1: put some chickpeas in your sprouting jar, add water and l...

Last week I started to review the introduction to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig.  This week I'll start on the first real chapter of recipes, called Mastering the Basics, which includes cultured dairy, sprouts, stocks, sauces and salad dressings. Cultured Dairy The strange part here is that we got Bella , our house cow, before I read this book and before I knew anything about the whole raw milk debate .  We drank raw milk sometimes when we visited our friends on a dairy farm, but we never really valued it as we should have.  My husband really wanted a cow because he liked the dairy lifestyle, and I couldn't see a problem with it, as I described previously , it will make it easier for us to get steers for beef instead of having to buy them locally.  Our friends told us they'd found the perfect cow for us, small, tame, already with a calf and used to being milked in the dairy, so even though we weren't totally ready , we brought home Bella...

Since I first posted about sprouts  after reading about them in Nourishing Traditions , I've been continuing to grow them regularly.  Alfalfa has to be my stand-out favourite, it works every time with no issues and its great to have some on hand in the sprouter or in the fridge to use in summer salads and sandwiches. Alfalfa is my favourite sprout I did branch out and try fenugreek.  This is a very useful herb and the seeds smell beautiful, so I couldn't wait to taste the sprouts, but my first few efforts ended in tragedy.  All the sprouts clumped together in the middle of the jar and there wasn't much sprouting action, they just ended up rotting, very frustrating! I tried several times following some of the advice here .  I put less seed in the jar, I broke up the seeds/sprouts to make sure they didn't clump together and washed them carefully.  I had absolutely no luck until a friend gave me some different seeds, which did work.  The lesson her...

I had been thinking about trying sprouting after I read about the benefits in Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats , but I hadn't got around to doing anything about it, until I saw a few posts on Craving Fresh , in which Emma raved about how easy and yummy they were. I bought a little kit from the Nanango Markets, you don't have to get a kit, I've seen some other posts with some great simple systems ( here and here ), but I liked the idea of this kit and it was only $15.  I also bought some seeds to sprout, I like to support local stalls. Anyway, the kit is a glass jar with a plastic lid that has drainage holes and a little stand so you can lean it facing downwards to encourage drainage.  For each of the seeds I soaked them first (overnight for the large ones and a few hours for the small ones) and rinsed them twice a day until they were big enough to eat, then put them in the fridge and started a new bat...