Grow Your Own Sprouts All Year Round

I have Mason Jars and the rings. I made my own drainage screen insert. I love that you can use Lentils and don't need to go to an over priced health food store. I also have Mung Beans that I bought at a Giant Eagle. You can do a lot with bean sprouts.



A Little extra info:
http://www.living-foods.com/articles/largebeans.html

SPROUTING LARGE BEANS: PROBLEMS

by Tom Billings

The following was posted on veg-raw, an e-mail list for raw food vegetarians. It is a reply to the question: how can I eat large, crunchy sprouted beans like kidney beans?

A: Raw kidney beans reportedly are toxic when eaten in large amounts; the toxin is eliminated by cooking. As raw kidney bean sprouts have a bitter, highly unpleasant flavor it could be difficult to consume a harmful amount. Some people who have tried to eat them raw, reported to me that they could not keep them down; they involuntarily vomited after eating them! Anyway, if you insist on eating kidney beans the best way is to sprout them for 1-1.5 days and then cook the sprouts - they require less cooking than dry/soaked beans. Cooked large sprouted beans are not bitter - their taste is similar to that of unsprouted, cooked beans - and they generally produce little or no flatulence (a good reason to sprout, then cook, large beans if you wish to eat them).

Most of the large beans contain enzyme inhibitors and are very hard to digest when raw. Further they usually produce large amounts of gas/flatulence, which is not good for you in the long run. The enzyme inhibitors are destroyed by the heat of cooking; because of this some raw food authors suggest that large beans be cooked before eating, if you choose to eat them. (Certainly there are many other seeds that can be sprouted and eaten raw). Another factor that prevents one from eating raw, sprouted large beans is their taste - extremely bad, so bad that most simply cannot tolerate eating them!

There are limited uses for some of the raw, sprouted large beans. Sprouts of black beans, blackeye peas, and small red beans, are sometimes used in small quantities as a flavoring ingredient in sprouting mixtures and/or salads (in effect, used as a condiment). Sprouted garbanzos, peanuts (also a legume - not a nut), and peas can be eaten alone or used as ingredients for recipes such as raw hummus. Soybean sprouts when short are bitter, astringent, and inedible unless cooked; if sprouted long enough they are (theoretically) edible raw, though you may find their taste unpleasant/intolerable.

Keep in mind that there are many other sprouting seeds, including many small beans/legumes (lentils, garbanzos, beans: mung, adzuki, urad, moth, etc.) that are edible when raw. Perhaps you can substitute small sprouted beans for large in your food preparation?

Grow Your Own Sprouts

from Homewood Garden Plot 41 by Jeannine from Pittsburgh

It's all of 1 °F outside, which is WAY too cold even for me to venture over to the garden plot!  But even in the dead of winter you can grow food for your table--honest! 

With a wide-mouthed Mason jar, sprouting lids, sprouting seeds, and a few inches of space on a windowsill, you can grow tasty and extremely nutritious sprouts for your salads, sandwiches and stir-fries! I discovered these sprouting lids and seeds in the Pinetree Garden Seeds catalog while I was putting together my seed order a few weeks ago, and thought, why not?  I've never grown my own sprouts before, but I've always enjoyed them on my salads.  Since they usually cost a pretty penny in the grocery store I assumed there must be some tricky technology involved in growing them.  There isn't!  Sprouting couldn't be easier.  Just measure out a couple of tablespoons of your sprouting seeds into a clean jar, cover them with water and put the screen lid on.  Let the seeds soak over night, and then pour out the water through the screen (which keeps the seeds inside the jar.)  Put the jar on its side on a windowsill.  Once a day rinse the seeds by filling the jar with water through the screen, and then dump it out again.  This takes all of about 10 seconds!  Within a week or so you'll have a quart jar full of ready-to-eat sprouts!

How cool is that?