one of my favorite new supermarket discoveries.

These brands of sprouts are so convenient. my experience sprouting at home has been..okay, but it's tough to get the tiny ones like clover and alfalfa to work. I do better with the bug mung beans and lentils.

anyway, these sprouts are grown in hawaii and the bags of clover sprouts are only 1.49. of course this is more than paying for the seeds and sprouting them yourself, but a much better deal than other brands that sell a little plastic box of them for 5.49. I also like the peas in the mixed bean bag. that bag was a dollar more i think, but it lasted me about a week because i would just add the beans as a colorful and crunchy topping to other meals. adding interesting stuff to salads encourages me to go through the work of arranging them.

Seeds to Sprouts to Plants

So i mentioned the amaranth i sprouted a little while ago. i put it under a thin layer of dirt and five days after the pictures i showed in the other post, they looked like this!


they are too thickly packed to really grow up that way, the individuals would compete for space and nutrients.

so if i want them to mature to real large plants i'll have to thin them out and put them in a bunch of other containers. i think at this point i could still eat them if i wanted to. they even look a little like alfalfa or clover sprouts, which i what most people think of when they hear "sprouts", the kind that come on a sandwich!
i guess technically what i am doing with the amaranth is called "greening". it is one step beyond sprouting ans is pretty much just planting the seeds. here's an excerpt from the big cookbook, The Complete Book of Raw Food:

Sprouts, if grown long enough will start to grow into plants with leaves. The major difference between sprouts and greens is that sprouts are eaten roots and all, whereas we generally discard the roots of greens and and harvest and eat only the leaves. Also, greens are generally grown in soil.


they also mention elsewhere that putting a jar of sprouts in some place with sunlight for 15 minutes before eating them will boost their chlorophyll content.

speaking of sprouts, here are some beansprouts (from mung beans.)





definately some leaves going on there!

surprises, good and otherwise

i was trying to sprout some amaranth as an experiment. i kept it moist for 3 days an nothing was happening so gave up and was just gonna let it dry up and brush it out of my sprouting jar. so i came back to it a day or more later and was surprised to see some pink dots in the tan colored grain. it was sprouting after all! i happened to look at a sprouting chart and it says amaranth should be sprouted in 24 hours. so either they mean you soak it without actually getting to the germinating stage, or my seeds where really slow. anyway, i think i'll just plant them rather than eat them.










i tried some jocalat bars and didn't really care for them. i got the chocolate cherry and chocolate hazelnut flavors. i found both jars to be pretty sour tasting. i think they don't sweeten the chocolate. i also tried the larabar chocolate chip brownie which is almost the extra same ingredients as the jocalot hazelnut bar (dates, chocolate, nuts, except that they add sugar and salt, and the larabar was better. but my fav ones are still the coconut and the peanut butter chocolate chip that i bought before.