Health & Happiness

There is nothing quite like sitting down to eat a bowl of food that you've grown yourself. Except maybe abandoning that bowl of food in order to get up and blog about it. Much like how I missed actually eating the deep fried bacon outside of veg camp that one time at Burning Man.

It gives a whole new meaning to being thankful for food when you've had a hand in making it happen. Almost like you have a relationship with it. And I think that's largely missing from how we eat today. Being a somewhat intangible, almost mystical sort of quality, it's not surprising that this sense of reverence, connection, and gratified wonder has faded from our food experience mostly without notice or comment, although the tradition of grace continues to limp along in scattered families.

My brain is having major happies knowing that the majority of yummies in this bowl came from my kitchen counter top sprouting project. Seeds and water. That's it. And they're SO beautiful. Curly mung bean, long neon green lentil, pink spicy radish and fresh exuberant broccoli - all different flavors, shapes, sizes and textures.

I stir fried the mungs and lentils in my big black cast iron wok with sesame oil, onion and ginger until they were bright green and white. Added a pinch of garlic salt, soy sauce and ice water to quickly steam them at the end, then turned off the heat. Scooped out a bowl and mixed in the radish and broccoli sprouts.

Amazingly, it actually tastes good. It's like a miracle or something. Food, from seeds. Who woulda thunk?

Heard that sprouting sunflower seeds makes good greens so I decided to try it. Started with some raw sunflower seeds and soaked 'em overnight in a colander.



Decided I'd rather use that colander for mung beans so switched them into a taller metal one hoping they'd have room to grow up big and tall.



Tried a big glass jar, too, but decided I really didn't like it because the sprouts would get tangled too much. Then I found these groovy little containers at the Goodwill in Downtown Sunnyvale. They've got a whole stack of them and they come with drain holes already included. Fuck all if I know what they were originally intended for, but they seem to be working pretty great for sprouting.



Went into a grocery store to see how long these things are supposed to grow. I've been clipping them off at just past finger length for happy little baby bouquet snacks. And how do they taste? Like sunflower seeds. But green.

I'm a sucker for mail order shit. Got a flier for these grow boxes well over a year ago then finally bit the bullet and bought as many as I thought I could find sunlight for.

This year I'm doing it with their fertilizer strip and burlap cover but next year I want to try compost instead. That's a whole nuther project, and one that will require still more dirt. I need to get some anyway, since my folks just gifted me with another small stack of pots and said that a lot of my cold weather crops will probably do okay in the shade if I get them started in the sun. We'll see.

This box was planted on the 23rd of January.

If my chart is correct, that should be radish, broccoli, cauliflower, broccoli raab, and brussels sprouts (counterclockwise from bottom right). I planted a bunch of stuff that I thought should come up and do okay in a mild bay area winter. Doubt the snow storms will make it here, though there's always a first time for everything.