Asparagus - pickles and soup

We made another trip to the U-Pick-It farm to pick another 10 pounds of asparagus. This time we decided we wanted to make a few quarts of pickled asparagus spears to enjoy later this year. Our kids LOVE them!

The first thing we did was to measure and cut the asparagus spears. We did this by figuring out how long we needed them to be to fit the jar, with the proper head spacing, and made a mark with permanent marker on our processing cutting board. This makes it a little easier to cut through a bunch of them quickly.

While we boiled our brine which we used this recipe for, we blanched and placed out asparagus spears into the jars with spices, an onion slice and a wedge of jalapeno.

After water bath canning for the proper amount of time (see your local Extension Service Office for your local canning times it can vary by elevation.) we were left with a beautiful little treat for later this year. Can you believe the color? The tips turned a reddish tint from the spices I assume.

But what did we do with all those ends that we cut off??? Some of them were a few inches long. That would be one heck of a waste wouldn't it?

Never fear, they were run through our food processor for a few seconds to prep them for another spring treat. Asparagus soup. This was a first try for us, but I have to say, the result was ... soooooo good!

After some onion and a little garlic were sweated in the pot in some butter; sorry I don't have the recipe, A~ was cooking I was making cheese... Anyway, the asparagus was added along with some stock and boiled for a little while. It was surprisingly quick.

After adding some cream and slow simmering for a bit, the soup was nearly finished. All we had left to do was to run it through a seive to remove the woody parts that were remaining. Remember, this soup is being made of the leftover stalks from our pickles.

And voila... after seiving, and adding a few drops of good Extra Virgin Olive oil and pepper, this soup was done, served and devoured!

Waste not want not. Our frugal ways yielded us a really tasty treat in this soup. I encourage you to search online, find a simple recipe that will allow you to just enjoy the flavor of the asparagus and go for it!
The rest of the meal was great too... this was just our "first course".
Till next time.
P~

Rhubarb-aide

A~ was reading something or other online a while back and read about an interesting thing called... Rhubarb-aide?!
I'd never heard of such a thing but as we had a big harvest of Rhubarb that - coincidentally - needed to be processed and since I'm always up for something new and interesting, well, here we go...

The way we like to process our rhubarb is to clean cut and sheet freeze them. Doing it that way allows us to store the frozen rhubarb in bags and lets us take out only what we need for a recipe.

In the back of this picture is a couple of the sheet pans that we filled with our cut rhubarb. In front is the cuttings and little bits that didn't make the cut... Didn't make the cut... hee hee.. get it? OK, I'm a dork.. anyway, they're in the food processor where we pulverized them with a little water, into a thin completely pureed slurry. We then filtered that slurry through some cheese cloth until we had this...

Essence of rhubarb. To which we added water and sugar to taste and voila.

The strangely iridescent green color that is Rhubarb-aide.

I'm not sure whether to say we loved it or not, but I'm gonna go ahead and add it to the list of at least once a summer tonics that we'll tweak and work with over the years to come. It certainly holds promise.

Have you tried it before? Any hints? recipes? Care to share?

Best to you all til next time.

P~

Kombucha Making

I spoke some time back about how I was experimenting with making some kombucha and I realized that while I had taken pictures of the progress I hadn't shared it with you, so I thought I'd take a minute to bring the blog up to date with the progress on that front.

To start with I needed to get a SCOBY started. For those not yet initiated in the ways of kombucha, a SCOBY is an acronym for Sybiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast.
This was the "mini"-SCOBY that I started with. It was collected from a store bought bottle of kombucha that a friend of mine gave me. To grow it into something that I could make a sizeable quantity of Kombucha from I placed in this bowl full of sweetened green tea. The Yeasts in the SCOBY consume the sugars in the tea and ferment it producing alchohol. This alchohol is then consumed, through further fermatation, by the various (beneficial) bacteria to produce acetic acid. An additional by product is the Cellulose that makes up the body of the SCOBY.

Now, biology lesson completed, I was successful in culturing my SCOBY into a nicely formed disc of Bacteria and Yeast which I would now send forth to do my komucha bidding!
That white color is from the cellulose that I was talking about.

Although you can't really see the bacteria, being microscopic and all, if you look in the photo below you can see the whispy tendrils hanging from the main body of the SCOBY. Those are mainly yeasts. Many of them being the same types that do our work for us in other goodies like Sourdough and kefir.
In fact, I was successful enough in culturing my SCOBY that I am now able to have two gallon Suntea jars going constantly brewing for me.


Now that only problem I have is that I'm running out of bottles. These bottles were from my Mr Beer experiment last year and have come in handy for bottling the finished product.

Kombucha is a naturally effervescent drink because as the yeast comsume the sugars, they also "breath" out CO2 as a by-product. After bottling the kombucha, I let it sit at room temperature for 3-4 days during which time it continues to brew and breath. The bottling holds in the CO2 and when it's opened. Phzzttt... Carbonated!

It's an acquired taste, I will say that for it, but once you've acquired it, you gotta have it. There's been some issues with the labeling on some of the store bought Kombucha out there lately and some of it has been pulled form the shelves. The nice part about making your own, as with all things, is that you always know what's in it, and more to the point that you can always get it!

You should try it out. You may not even like it after trying, but it's a great science experiment and fun to watch progress. If you do try... good luck!
P~

Strawberries and the new Dehydrator

You may remember the dehydrator we were able to get this winter because of an arrangement I made with CSN stores. You know, the online store that offers everything from Lighting to, well, to dehydrators for instance. We've used the dehydrator a couple of times so far for jerky, but now we have fresh strawberries that we wanted to be able to use for things later this year and decided we wanted to test out dehydrating them.
The strawberries weren't huge, so I cut them right down the middles and lay them flat after a quick dip in a citric acid bath (To preserve color and flavor.)
They really thinned out quite a bit, but the flavor is like.. POW! STRAWBERRY! These will be great in some recipe or on dry cereal.

But of course when the strawberries are fresh for that little window of the year, you have to have some fresh! When A~ makes fresh sourdough waffles (Yeah you heard that right, sourdough waffles.) nothings better on top than a little whip cream and fresh strawberries.

Maybe if we ask real nice we can get A~ to start blogging on here with some of her great recipe's? I think I've almost got her conviced... anyone else out there want to hear fromthe other (read: better) half of this equation?

Take care all.

L..L..L..Limoncello!

I tried a new experiment yesterday. It's something that I've wanted to do for some time and yet, somehow, after I brought home the fresh Meyer lemons from my moms tree a couple of months ago, I didn't think of it.Remember these? I'm telling you they are the best damn lemons I've ever had! Every time I've cut them, or used them for anything I am over whelmed with the sheer lemoneyness (is that a word? It is now!) of them.

So as I was saying, I brought home a big bag of these from my visit with the folks 2 months ago. I love them so much I wanted to make sure that I used them for something that would really capture the essence of them. The problem was, I mostly use lemons in the Summer with our fresh fruits and veggies and they just aren't there yet.

Then, last week, while A~ and I were at the liquor store we were talking and joking and then mentioned Limoncello and BANG! Brainstorm! I can't think of anything that would better capture the sweet lemoneyness (yeah, there's that new word again...feel free to use it anytime...) than some delicious homemade Limoncello. I found a pretty easy recipe online that even I could do on my own and that I needed nothing special to do.I used a regular potato peeler to peel the rind off the lemons into thin but wide strips of the zest from 10 lemons.

I later made sure that I juiced the lemons so as not to waste any of the lemons whatsoever. That will be getting concentrated with some sugar into a special summer treat to make some lemonade with.I added all the lemon zest peels into a large bowl and poured a full new 750 ml bottle into the bowl on top of them. Next I used a potato masher to give the peels a light pressing, not enough to crush them just enough to make me feel like I did a little work you know?

The recipe is as follows:
10 lemons
1 (750-ml) bottle vodka
3 1/2 cups water
2 1/2 cups sugar

You can see that there's a good bit of water and sugar added after the lemons have had a chance to steep in the Vodka for 4 days. I'll need to make a simple syrup from the sugar and water in a couple of days and then cool it completely before adding it to the strained out Vodka. Then I can refrigerate it for easily a month.

I have to add to this that I did give it a little "one day" test tonight by adding a bit of it to a little sugar and water just to check if it's doing anything. Oh man I can't wait!! It was soooooo goood! Wish I could have you all up for a visit and a sample. Oh yeah, and by the way in case you were wondering how these lemons held up for two whole months in the fridge. They were literally no different than any fresh lemons that I may have picked up in the store the day before. It truly was a testament to how long fresh lemons can last. Hmm? makes me wonder how old those lemons in the store are?

Hey Mom... how about some more lemons next time your out huh? You should give this a try. You're neighbors would love it.

All the best to you all. Catch you again soon.
P~

Creamy Curry Butternut Bisque

I decided to so a little food experimenting the other day. I put up a few good sized butternut squash this fall, a first for me, and since I really don’t have any experience cooking it I felt a little experiment was in order.

Ok, ok, you caught me... I have cooked it before. But only like once and it was just steamed with some butter and brown sugar and wasn't really very good at all, so I don't count it. I decided to try something a little different with two of our butternuts and went with a creamy, bisque-like, curry soup. I'm happy to say that it came out much like I had imagined that it would. I don't often cook, and even at that I don't often cook with a recipe. A guideline yes, but a true recipe not so much. It's a blessing and a curse to be so comfortable winging it and it has re payed me with both some very tasty dishes as well as some real dogs! This one falls into the former category.

So then, first and most importantly, let me introduce the main stars of this show. A couple of nice sized home grown butternut squash and some smallish but very tasty homegrown storage onions from the cold storage.I might mention that I decided to try storing my butternut squash outdoors this year after reading about someone else that uses their front porch as their long term storage option. I kept them out back inside of my small metal shed and well, they froze. It was just too cold out there. The good news is that they seem to have frozen once and then stayed that way so the damage to the texture of the squash was minimal. After a couple of days on the kitchen counter they defrosted nicely and were still very firm.

The ingredients:
•2 med - large butternut squash peeled and chopped to about 1 inch squares.
•Approx 2 cups of onion sliced evenly
•5-6 cloves of garlic. Peeled and rough chopped
•Curry spice and seasoning mix in a small dish. (The seasonings contained about 80% curry seasoning, and the remaining 20% as a mix of onion and garlic powder, pepper, some ginger and a couple pinches of cinnamon.)
•One can or approx 1 1/2 cups of chicken broth.
•Cream or milk or both as you prefer.

Cook the onions with about 1/4 stick of butter tempered with a bit of olive oil in a good sized sauce pan until they are nearly translucent and then throw in the garlic. (Tempering the butter with olive oil raises the temperature the butter can reach without burning and lets the onions cook better at this point. Tempering is a fancy pants term that just means putting the oil in the hot pan first and then adding the butter.) When the garlic gets to the point that it's softening and getting well cooked in, toss in about 3/4 of the curry seasoning mix. The heat releases the oils and flavors in the spices and sort of "wakes them up" for the most flavor.

Cook all of this over medium-high for a few minutes stirring occasionally to keep it from burning or sticking too much then add about a half cup of the broth. Stir this really well and make sure to scrape up any little bits of the onion, garlic, curry that may be sticking to the bottom of the pan. This is called deglazing a pan and will get you lots of good flavor for whatever you are cooking.Now add the chopped squash, the remaining seasonings and the rest of the broth, turn everything together, cover and bring to a slow boil. When it starts to bubble, reduce heat to a simmer and cook covered until the squash is completely soft. I added some more butter at this point, but I'd say that was entirely optional, I just like the buttery flavor with squash.

Once the squash is soft, I used a potato masher to break up and mash all the ingredients together. Once you get it well mashed, you may find it to be like a thick applesauce consistency and want to add either some water, or better yet more broth, to thin it a bit. (Don't make it too thin, because we still need to puree and add cream.) You'll also want to add salt to taste at this point as it will still be rather bland. Cook it for another 15 minutes or so on low, and get out either a food processor or stand mixer. If you use a stand mixer you may need to do it in two batches. Pour everything into the processor leaving a little bit of room at the top. Blend until mostly smooth. Now add the milk or cream or, as I did, about even of each and mix further until your happy with the texture and flavor.

And there you go. My Creamy Curry Butternut Squash Bisque.
I topped it with a few sliced onions and some paprika and it was really good.

I did make an interesting observation though, quite by accident. Although not a spicy soup itself, it compliments spicy food very well. We were having buffalo wings for lunch the day that I made this and I had a small bowl of it at the same time. It went really well together strangely? The next day when I ate it for lunch I added a few chopped pieces of a hot pickled pepper to it and it went good together as well.

I hope you give it a try. Let me know if you like, or as always if you have any suggestions that may make it better.
Till next time
P~

Harvest Savers 8-21-08

This weekend past, and yes I apologize for my neglect this week, I had a deadline at work that needed to be met today and well, let's just say that I had my hours for the week plus a few for next week in the bag by this afternoon so I was a bit preoccupied working to support my gardening habit. But as I was saying; this past weekend, we were able to put up a few more jars of food from the garden. Our boys loved the bread and butter pickles that we put up last year, and begged us to make more so with our first harvest of our pickle cucumbers we made 4 quarts of them. A~ worked hard on Sunday, while I was actually at the office for a few hours. When I returned she surprised me with those two quarts of red goodness. Pickled beets! I can't wait to break into those babies. She also took 6 pounds of our hamson and san marzano tomatoes and made a great smelling spaghetti sauce that we canned. Three pint jars full and one nearly full that we'll be eating soon.
We also did something a little different this time.

We used our fire pit for the hot water bath method that we used to can with. It was all very "Little house on the prairie". The last time we did any major canning, we noted how much it raised the temperature of the house. Since we have been trying to use as many passive cooling methods as possible to keep the inside temps down, we didn't want to heat it up just to can a few quarts. A~ had gotten a good start already on the prep work in the kitchen, and I had gotten the pot set up as seen above and started the fire. Our 10 and 11 year boys were placed in charge of this and that was their contribution to the process. (I have to add here, that keeping a fire and respecting it is something we have worked on with them for some time, and at no time were they unsupervised for very long.) Using the fire worked very well and allowed us to burn off some scrap OSB that we had laying around.

Now that I realized that our fire pit can be used for more than just roasting marshmallows, I have a couple of things that I think I'll try out with it. Stay posted for that. I should have a few good "catch-up" posts that I've been meaning to get around to this weekend.

Thanks for the patience,

P~

Plan your NY times no Knead Bread

So maybe it's just me, but every time I decide I want to make some of the NY times no-knead bread, I have to try to count ahead and figure out exactly what time I will need to turn it out to rest, and then put it in the oven to bake. So what's a hopeless geek to do?
You make yourself a one look chart to tell you what time to turn it out, and when (approx.) that it will be done baking. Click to enlarge and you'll see on the left column a listing of start times. This would of course be the time that you mix the flour water and yeast together, cover and set aside for a long period.

The next three colums are broken into two times each. The left side is the time, after either 15, 16, 17, or 18 hours (depends on temperature and preference) that you will turn it out and prepare to bake it. This means letting it rest for approx 2 hrs. Then you bake it for nearly an hour so I added the right side to show you what time it could be done cooking.

I know it's a bit anal, but I like to be able to think about when I want to have the bread and know when I need to get started, or vice versa, so Ifigured there must be others. If your inclined, feel free to copy, print or link to this post for others to use. Consider it my gift to you. Aren't I generous? LOL.

Hope you all have a great weekend.

P~

Our Daily Bread

Oh what a weekend! A~ and I seemed to be going from one thing to another, but strangely I never felt rushed? I have found my blog linked to on other sites being listed as a homesteading blog, and I guess from time to time I could say "Yeah I guess I am." but generally speaking I just feel like a guy who's curious about the world around him, and who loves to experiment and learn how to do things on my own. This weekend however, I could say I really did get the feeling of being kind of a "Little house in the suburbs".

Today I'm talking bread. I've heard about this no knead bread recipe that was first made popular by a NY times article on it. (The recipe is on the link.) And it sounded so good we had to try it. A~ and I both love good bread, but as most home bakers have discovered, you just can't get that bakery quality crusty crust at home. Well now people you can. A~ mixed the dough Saturday afternoon, but Sunday I did the majority of the work on the bread. I say this to let you know that anyone can make this bread, I am not a baker by any means, I was entrusted once to take bread out of the mixer and form it into the pans and managed to wait too long and got airy mutant loaves. This bread was nearly idiot proof. Not only that, but besides the fact that it takes a long time to make in wait time, in actual hands on time it takes no more than maybe ten minutes! How was it? Oh man, I tell you it was good!

Another thing we did this weekend was to feed our little kitchen pet. No it's not a pet rock, it's a sourdough start. If you've not begun a sourdough start of your own, you just don't know what your missing in sourdough pancakes alone. It's easy to do, keeps essentially indefinitely in the fridge, and can be used for all sorts of goodies; although we've only used ours for bread and pancakes. I know that it's possible to make a start from wild yeast, and in fact A~ and I did manage to successfully get one going, but it was just a little too ripe for us and I would bet even a little unpredictable. When using wild sourdough one of the instructions is that if it begins to smell sour or just generally funky, toss it and try again. Now this would be absolutely acceptable to me in a survival situation, but for general day to day baking we decided we wanted a more predictable and controllable start. To get this we mixed:
1 Cup Flour

1 Cup Water

1 packet dry active yeast
1 Tablespoon Sugar

This, we let sit in a bowl covered with a paper towel at room temperature for 1 week to 10 days until it began to smell, well, beery for a lack of a better description. Then we placed it in a 1 qt Mason Jar and refrigerated it. All we have to do is take out what we need for the recipe at the time, then feed the remaining start with 3/4 each of flour and water and let it sit covered at room temp overnight. If we don't use it for a little while, we will occasionally need to "feed" it by stirring in a tablespoon of sugar. The start in the picture is ours and it's a little over 2 months old. We've noticed that as it begins to mature, it's flavor has begun to become more full and tangy. Give it a try, I'm sure you'll love it.

And what would all this tasty homemade goodness be without a little bit of fresh homemade butter. Last week we bought a container of whipping cream for making mashed potatoes. The remaining bit of cream has been sitting in the fridge. We don't generally use a lot of cream at our house so I was afraid of it going bad. So while we're talking about the baking that we're doing A~ and I both come up with the idea of making butter with it. It's something that we've both wanted to try, and the kids were a little spazzy that day so why not harness the energy for good use right. I added the approx 1 pt of cream, to a 2 Qt canning jar that we had and started shaking it. Shake Shake Shake, Shake Shake Shake, Shake your Butter, Shake your butter... (yeah I grew up in the seventies.) All of a sudden it seemed, the butter separated from the buttermilk and we were in business. I shook it a but more to finish binding the butter fats, and then poured off the buttermilk. (Buttermilk biscuits this week??) After pouring off the butter milk I added cold water to the jar with the butter and shook again to "wash" it. Continue this, emptying the cloudy buttermilk water and refilling with fresh until it shakes and the water stays clear; this removes all the buttermilk that could cause it to go rancid over time. All told it took about 20 minutes, but we were watching You Tube music videos at the same time and dancing around the kitchen so it flew by! last step is to use a spatula or big spoon to work the butter in a bowl forcing out and discarding any water remaining in the butter and turning in a pinch of salt for flavor. That's it, fresh homemade butter. The kids loved it, have yours try it, they will too!

P~

Food Storage

From the standpoint of food production, storage, handling, and the Lord's counsel, wheat should have high priority. (God, Family, Country, p. 269)

I agree. My wife and I have talked a lot in the last few months about wanting to store up some wheat. We have a good quantity of stored foods such as beans, rice, flour, sugar and water, but wheat is one of the great multi-purpose storage foods that we have not had in it. We don't just want to store it though, it's something that we want to begin to integrate into our regular diet. That brings me to a point I'd like to make about food storage, eating it. There are a lot of people that have begun to put up food of late and the more volatile the circumstances around the world become, more and more people will begin too. How many people eat these types of foods on a regular basis however? So many people don't really know where their foods come from anymore, let alone how to produce it themselves. If we don't take time to learn how to use these foods, we will not have the luxury of learning to use them when the time comes that we need to. Now in our home we are by no means experts, and probably still have more to learn than we have learned so far. There are a lot of things that we can do to take action towards learning though.
Last week my wife and I attended a educational opportunity surrounding the many uses of wheat that our church put on. The family that put on the presentation is one that uses wheat regularly in their diet. We learned about the benefits of sprouted wheat and watched them make a delicious whole wheat bread from freshly ground wheat. This is a bread that we have eaten before, a neighbor and friend regularly bakes it and we've been the lucky recipients of a loaf from time to time. We also got the opportunity to try what they called "wheat meat"; this was an interesting concoction that they made from hydrated wheat, ground and seasoned, then fried like a burger. The flavor was good but the texture could have used a little something; however, it was definitely something I'd like to experiment with. Towards the end of the presentation they showed us a couple of very interesting ways to cook using less fuel, and espoused the benefits of juicing wheat grass. It was a good time and I learned a lot of things that I didn't know.

Another thing to think about with regard to food storage, is the type of storage that we choose to have. Wheat, beans, legumes and other dry goods will last for a very long time in our storage with a minimum of effort. These are things that have been found in the pyramids of egypt still viable and good. A cool, dry place and careful rotation are really the biggest things to be concerned with. Also, these foods with not be effected if there were widespread power outages as frozen foods would, and are much more versatile overall.

Over the upcoming winter months I'll be experimenting with some of the things that I learned and of course passing on my findings. A~ and I hope to be able to become much more skilled at incorporating these foods into our regular diet and using them to move towards a more sustainable and vegi-centric diet.

If you don't have wheat or plentiful dry goods in your storage, I encourage you to look into them and learn about them with me. If these things are an active part of your home storage and even more so your regular diet please share with me your knowledge and any tidbits that may be able to help me as I move forward.

First Harvest of the Year!!!

Can anyone out there think of a better way to enjoy Earth Day, that with the first harvest of the year from ones home garden? I can't! Today I found the Rhubarb in the yard that I was so close to pulling out this year was about to bolt, so I went out to trim it up. In doing this, I decided to clip off some of the larger stalks. Well, long story short, I could smell the rhubarb stalks, and "ding" lightbulb moment. A~ stocked the fridge with some tasty strawberries yesterday, so I decided to get in the kitchen and make up a rhubarb-strawberry pie. Yeah yeah, you heard me right, I went into the kitchen to bake a pie. and might I say, it was soooo, tasty! And of course, like anything coming from your own yard, it tasted all the better. I decided this recipe is going in the bookmarks list, and of course I'll share it here. Get out and try it; you'll just taste the summer coming!

Sprout Final

Well, here it is. The final yield from my tablespoonful of seeds. I know that I took forever posting this pic, but I took it after 6 days, 7 if you count the day that I put the seeds in water to soak overnight. This is probably about two of the packages that you would buy in the store. I know it doesn't seem like a really huge amount, but when you consider the container of seed that I bought was $3 and some change, it is really quite a major savings, besides the fact that you just can't get better tasting or healthier sprouts.

Sprouts Day 6

Well here we are at Day 6. The sprouts are now about 1 3/4 inch tall. I can eat them anytime not, but I like to wait until they are a bit bigger. I will post my last update in another day or two with the final product. I hope you get inspired to try these on your own. They are a great addition to the wonderful fresh salads and veggies we'll have here shortly in the summer, but can be enjoyed all year. Have fun, and get sprouting!!
P~

Sprout Day 4

Day four and the sprouts are really kicking into gear.

See those long roots! actually they're about 3/4 inch long. Tonight instead of covering the sprouts with water and then pouring it out through the nylon filter, I decided to try a different method of watering the sprouts. I took a regular all pupose spray bottle, filled with clear water and spritzed the top of the sprouts. Not too much, just enough to dampen the sprouts. The reason for this is that one of the issues I have had in the past is that as the sprouts germinate and grow and I tip the jar over to drain the water, they inevitably fall onto the lid. Not really a big deal, but when I push them back down onto the bottom of the jar I break some of them, and they tend to grow all curly and knotted up with each other. Again, not really a big deal, but if you were as obsessive compulsive as me, it'd drive you nuts. trust me.

Here is the top view.

Getting excited about a sprout? trust me these babies are way sweeter and tastier on your turkey sandwich than any you could get from the store.
More tomorrow.

Sprouts Day 3

Well here we are at day three, 48 hours have passed. I guess it's really day two if you consider that day one was just putting the seeds in the jar.
I took the jar down tonight after dinner, and added about an inch of water. Enough to cover it well, it's really not a scientific process. Anyway, same as yesterday I drain and then push all the seeds to the bottom. Rinse, Drain, Repeat, Rinse, Drain, Repeat. I took a new picture and TAADAA sprouts are popping out all over. In retrospect I think that leaving them to soak for a full twenty four hours is a good thing. These sprouted a lot more vigorously than the last batch I grew.

Sprouts Day 2

Alright, it's been about 24 hours. You really only need to leave them to soak for 12 but it won't hurt them to go a little longer. Now the reason for the nylon scrap is more evident. After letting them soak, you turn the jar over and drain all of the water out. Some water will of course linger at the bottom, but let it sit upside down for a minute to get out as much as you can.
After I do this, I have seed spread all over the side of the jar, not a good place for the sprouts to grow, so I scrap them down to the bottom of the jar with a long wooden tool (Truth be told, I use an extra paint stir stick that's a little concaved, it works great.) and spread them evenly on the bottom.
Here is the end result. This is a closer look at the seeds them selves. they are really saturated and swollen, you can see there are a couple that are already showing green and getting ready to sprout.

After draining, I place the jar on top of the refrigerator where it is a little warmer and perfect for sprouting.
More Soon...

P~

I've got tasty greens

I've been playing around with a little indoor garden lately. It's a really small indoor garden and gives me a sweet green to eat with my burgers, sandwiches, salads or just for a little snack any time of the year. I've been growing alfalpha sprouts in my kitchen! All I needed was an inexpensive container of seeds, an old mason jar that was sitting in a box in the garage, and a scrap piece of nylon panyhose. I thought I'd document it for anyone that has thought about trying this for yourself. First of all, you'll need to get your supplies together.

I've got my seeds, jar, nylon, and a tablespoon measure to measure out my seed.
The first step is to take 1 tbsp of seed and add it too our jar. Now pay attention, this is the difficult part, cover it with a good bit of water and let it sit overnight. The Nylon is used to cover the jar and keep dust out. It also has a more important use, but we'll get to that tomorrow.
Here is what it looks like when it starts. Not too exciting, but give it a day or so.