If you need more convincing, Catharyn Elwood packs a lot of
examples into a few pages of her book, FEEL LIKE A MILLION
(Pocket Books, Inc., 75¢). For now, let's just say
that sprouts are powerful food.
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Inexpensive too. If you buy a hundred pounds of
organically-grown soybeans for fifteen dollars plus
freight, say, your cost per pound will average twenty
cents. If you then soak and sprout the beans, you'll find
you harvest four to eight pounds of shoots from each pound
of dry beans. Your cost for the delicious, vitamin-packed
sprouts, then, is less than five cents per pound .
. . nothing to sneeze at in these days of funny money,
recession and unemployment.
BUT DO SPROUTS TASTE
GOOD?
I can appreciate questions about the taste of sprouts
because I don't care for cooked okra, turnips, cabbage and
a lot of other garden fare. I do like fresh green
salads and raw vegetables, however, and that's what most
sprouts—especially raw alfalfa sprouts—are all
about. Soybean shoots served the same way have a little too
much raw bean taste for me but become magically delicious
with only the slightest (about one-two minutes) steaming.
Sprouted wheat goes well on cereal and is excellent in
home-baked bread, rye sprouts add a mouthwatering wild rice
taste when sprinkled into soups just before serving and
sprouted peas are fantastic if lightly steamed and served
with a pat of butter melting down through them. Almost
everyone, of course, has a favorite Chinese recipe built
around mung bean sprouts.
Which is to say that there's almost as much variety in the
taste of sprouts as there is in "traditional" vegetables.
Personal tastes vary but you're sure to find at least half
a dozen "kinds" of sprouts and a couple of hundred sprout
recipes that suit you to a T. Almost any natural foods
cookbook features a great number of ideas for using the
little critters, starting with raw salads and ending with
"pick-me-up" beverages made by blending the shoots with
various combinations of fruit juices, nuts and honey. The
possibilities are truly endless.
So, if you recognize a good thing when you see it, you're
probably gonna run right out, get you a sprouter and start
tapping all the goodness Momma Nature has locked into
seeds. To coin a phrase, "Start sprouting . . . and start
living!"
HOW AND WHAT TO SPROUT
Almost any seed, grain or legume can be successfully
sprouted although most devotees of the art think that
alfalfa, soybeans, mung beans, lentils, peas and the cereal
grasses—wheat, oats, barley and rye—give the
very best results. Unhulled sesame and sunflower, radish,
mustard, red clover, fenugreek, corn, lima beans, pinto
beans, kidney beans, chick peas, cress, millet and nearly
any other seed you can think of will work, however (never
eat potato sprouts though, the plant is a member of the
poisonous nightshade family).
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