The Human Lawnmower: A Grimm Fairytale For Baby Plants

OR

Growing Greens For The Lazy, Cheap, and Yardless

Alfalfa sprout salad

"It was a bright and sunny morning," said the Kalanchoe ominously (or would have if it had vocal chords), "just like this one." The African Violets nodded earnestly in agreement. (They could also have been swaying in the wind - it's hard to tell with Violets.) The Kalanchoe waved his branches as if warding off evil and loomed over the jar before him. Tiny sproutlings quivered in his vision, tightly packed as a yard of clover. 

"Little sprouts like you sat her not long ago... but that day they disappeared, and I never saw them again."

"What happened to them?!" shouted one of the taller seedlings, leaning forward. The Kalanchoe eyed him pitifully, noting the flush of chlorophyll in his newly formed leaves and knowing the same fate was to befall him soon. The table began to shake as monster footsteps drew near.

"The Sprout Eater."

Has anyone noticed how short lettuce season is? I mean, if you shop at a grocery store or eat other salad greens more resilient to cold then probably not, but the natural Canadian season for lettuce is only a few months long. We hardly start enjoying fruit salads before it's on to the cob salads and then pumpkin and whoops it's snowing you missed it. From the first of September this year our temperatures took a nosedive and parts of the country have already experienced frost and snow. Poor, gentle lettuce doesn't have a hope in Nunatsiavut of surviving very long up here (unless you're Niki Jabbour and make cold frames for the little guys).

When you're a stickler like me and picky about where your grocery store produce comes from, lettuce is basically a no-go in everything but peak season. I've made a rule of not buying anything from outside my country that can be grown in my country. So avocados and citrus fruit are an exotic treat, but berries or veggies from the States are forbidden. It's no 100-mile diet, but it's a small reduction in my carbon footprint that's not hard to maintain. Even GF's on board with it. The warm fuzzies of buying "local" turn into a pain in the butt, though, when I really crave something I can't get, like lettuce in the winter. It's all from California, and generally looks like hell (sorry).

Sprouted alfalfa seeds

Enter the horrific sprout-eater story. If that didn't make a crazy, "I only eat food that fell from the tree," fruititarian out of someone I'll be surprised. GF was actually alarmed when she realized what I'd become. I've been growing baby plants, letting them think their life's adventure was just beginning, then eating them by the bowlful just as they turned green. I've become an infant plant murderer.

Like my mother, many of you may have alarm bells ringing in your heads at the word "sprouts". Images of yellowy, bean-like plants in plastic containers with warning of E. coli may be flashing in front of your mind's eye. A boy in my elementary school, bless him, used to eat those pale plants by the handful, and my fellow students used to tease him endlessly about them (while eating their oh-so-healthy Lunchables). His mother was onto something, though, and obviously ahead of her time in the holistic world, if not quite on the right track. I urge anyone wasting money on these supermarket bean sprouts to hear me out, and anyone unfamiliar with all this baby plant consumption to relax about all the germs.

Sprouts are the beautiful little beginnings of edible plants, and they are both delicious and cheap. They're made by soaking raw seeds, nuts, or grains periodically in water over a few days and lettings the baby plants hidden inside those shells to start to grow before mercilessly snatching away their life once they're a few hours/days old. Sprouts are hailed for being full of enzymes, antioxidants, and amazing, life-saving chlorophyll (plant blood, rich with magnesium). They are by far one of the most raw, pure sources of sunlight we can pump into our bodies, and they make a lovely (if a bit different) replacement for lettuce in a salad.

This being said, a supermarket sprout is pale (although those kind of sprouts are anyway), dry, and probably a few weeks dead before you buy them, therefore those lovely perks that make sprout-eating worthwhile are completely null and void in those yellow bean sticks. Plus they've been sitting around in stagnant water for a while, so E. coli has time to multiply. Yum yum. Sprouting at home ensures you're getting the benefits of living, germ-free plants, while saving money and experiencing a bit of variety, should you so choose. It's ridiculously easy to grow sprouts - you need no special equipment, no particular heat, no parental supervision, and no yard or balcony. You don't even need a south-facing window. 

Sunflower seeds, pepitas, buckwheat, chia,
mung beans, adzuki beans, spelt, alfalfa,
teff, amaranth
(All bought for UNDER $10)

As a general rule, you can sprout all seeds, most nuts, lentils, chickpeas, adzuki and mung beans. You can find specifications of what sprouts best and how long they need to do so (like on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ) all over the internet, but I mostly just avoid large beans and eat'm when they're green.

A good starting bean for sprouting are lentils. To be honest, I've never actually sprouted lentils, but where most other sprout seeds can be hard to find outside of a health or specialty store, lentils (or chickpeas) can be bought dry in bags at the local supermarket. Grab a small handful of beans (they're going to expand to about 8x their size) and dump them in a glass jar. Most people use mason jars, but I've got washed out salsa containers, and a glass cup would be okay, too. A clear plastic cup might work, but I haven't tried. You want something that will allow the seeds light and create a little greenhouse effect. Over the lip of the jar you'll need some sort of mesh to hold the beans in but filter water out. I use some muslin cloth I found in the sewing scraps. Many people use a plastic or metal wire screen. Again, your call. Stretch your barrier over the top of the jar and grab something to hold it in place - I use rubber bands or hair elastics. Fill your jar with water and let your beans soak for a while. Like with the ingredients in a stock, the bigger your seeds, the longer you should soak them. Alfalfa seeds take four or so hours, lentils maybe five or six. I usually just let them go until the water looks cloudy. Sometimes overnight.

Soaking alfalfa seeds

Once your seeds have had a good bath, drain all the water, rinse them, then find a place where you can sit them to dip-dry. The water needs to seep out and the sprouts need to breathe, so don't put them face down on a plate or anything. I put mine on the lip of a soup cup at an angle, but you can flip yours fully upside down as long as they're on a dish drainer or something equally elevated and holey. They don't need to be in the sun right away - for mung beans, some folks suggest they should never be in light. You can let them grow on your kitchen counter, if you want. Just poke them in the sun during their last day so they start making that beautiful chlorophyll and turn green.

Now comes the easy part. Let the sprouts do their thing. Rinse them at least once a day (twice, once in the morning and once at night, is usually recommended, but ain't nobody got time for that) and eat them when they've got decently long tails on them or are turning green (again, the amount of time you let them grow for depends on the type of plant; consult the Google). Lentils should be eaten before they grow leaves. You can eat the seed husks or rinse them off. It's totally personal preference. Use them on/as salad, top a burger, dehydrate them and use them in bread, throw some in a casserole, whatever. Generally you should avoid cooking sprouts, though, because putting any sort of baby in an oven is guaranteed to kill off anything you like about them.

Spelt and adzuki beans sprouting
(Kalanchoe in the background)

Important things to note!

1) As a VERY IMPORTANT NOTE, you can sprout kidney beans (and it's cousins, like navy, pinto, and black beans), but you HAVE TO COOK THEM. This does kill off enzymes, but eating big beans raw, especially kidney beans, will make you violently ill. They're poisonous. Sprouting and then cooking beans of any sort, though, makes them much easier for our bodies to digest by turning their complex carbohydrates into simpler ones and making their nutrients more bio-available. If you're prone to gas when you eat beans, sprouting them beforehand will more than likely prevent that. 

2) Always get your sprout seeds from a food store, NOT a gardening store, where they may be cheaper but coated in pesticides/herbicides. Even if they're organic, it's a much safer bet to find some at food-grade. 

3) As anyone who clicked on Leanne Vogul's sprout FAQ link may have noticed, some people drain their sprout jars and then leave them right side up to grow. You can do this too, but I suggest the face-down method because it ensures there's no water pooling at the bottom of your container for mold to grow in.

Jar-sprouted teff. Bad idea.

4) Some very small or gelatinous seeds, like teff or chia, can't really be grown in jars. For those you need to use the toss-them-on-a-plate-and-attack-them-with-a-spray-bottle method, which I haven't tried. I did try doing the teff-in-a-jar method, though, and it just got moldy and attracted fruit flies. Alfalfa seeds are probably the smallest you should go with jar sprouting.

5) I use the green-tinted water the sprouts drip off to water my other plants, and they seem to love it. Good (cannibalistic?) sprout food for all!

Sun-filled and growing,

- Leah

Special GF Recipe: Carrot and Sweet Potato Soup

OR

The Three-Ingredient Autumn Dinner

(Being as GF now knows I've been writing about her - and she likes the alternate name, because it reminds her of Final Fantasy VIII - she's agreed to write recipes for my blog! This is good news for both you and I, because I can't cook well/don't measure with recipes and she's a cutie. This is one of my favourite soups she makes. It's super simple and is both light and filling. I've put it in a bottle and had it as a drink before for travel convenience. Adding the ginger in makes it to die for.)

(Sorry, I didn't have a photo of the soup from when it was last made.
This is it frozen.)

Hi everybody! GF here with on of my many delicious recipes! Today it's going to be a... drum-roll, please! Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup! Or SPACS! That sounded and looked better in my head. Don't care! Rolling with it!

So, to create your SPACS you'll need the following items:

- A big pot (or a small one. Depends how much soup you want.)

- 2 large bowls

- Large carrots (5-20, again depending how much soup you want.)

- 1-3 Large sweet potatoes (more soup = more potatoes)

- A small chunk of ginger root (optional - it's great for flus and colds and icky feels)

- Wooden spoon/plastic ladle

- Peeler and a knife

- 1L or 1-2 cans of stock (I usually use beef)

Now that you've assembled your stuff, we begin!

Step One: Peel your carrots and potatoes! If you're using it, peel a tiny chunk of ginger, too.

Step Two: Cut your vegetables into chunks! Small chunks are best. 

Step Three: Toss your vegetables (ginger too) into your pot and add water! You want the veggies to be totally covered with about a third more.

Step Four: Boil them babies! (Don't cover the pot!)

Step Five: When your carrots and potatoes are super soft (super duper soft) remove the pot from the heat. Carefully scoop the veggies into a large bowl. If you used ginger, that can go in your compost bin now. Pour the (now orange) water you boiled your stuff in into another large bowl. (Got that? One bowl has boiled veggies, the other has orange broth.)

Step Six: Pureé/mash your vegetables! It's easier to do in smaller amounts and with the leftover liquid. Scoop some of the orange broth into whatever you're using to mash or blend you veggies (blender, bowl) and then toss the smushed up stuff back into your pot!

Step Seven: Once your veggies have been turned to glop and are in your pot you can, should you wish, add some more of your broth - but not too much, because you're going to pour in the entire carton/cans of your liquid stock! All of it!

Step Eight: Gently heat and stir your soup for about 20 minutes, then serve! 

Bonus: your leftover carrot broth can now be stored and used as a soup base or cooking broth! Try using it to cook your Rice and Lentils instead of just plain water. Yum!

(P.S:

1) There are such things as rainbow carrots. That was terrible English. Feel free to use purple, yellow, or white carrots (not parsnips, although I'm sure they'd be yummy) in place of orange ones for this recipe! Your soup might have more of a brown colour, bit it'll still taste the same - and it'll have the added benefits of different phytonutrients!

2) You don't have to have a big, powerful Vita-mix to make cream soups - we use a little Magic Bullet. A potato masher also works, although it'll be chunkier.)

Enjoy!

- GF (and Leah)

Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?

OR

How Putting Bones In The Freezer Helps Keep You Fed

I'm one of those people who knows the words to 90% of the songs that come on the radio.

Ask me who the song's performed by or what it's called and I'll stare at you like a deer in the headlights, but I can generally memorize at least the tune of a song the first time I hear it and know a good chunk of the lyrics by the third. I have no idea how I learn them, I just do. 

Like how double-jointed people don't know how they freakishly dis-form their limbs. Ugh.

In my tiny apartment freezer I have a bag of green bin-worthy vegetable scraps, and, until recently, a bag of leftover chicken bones and skin. They get tucked away on the freezer door or in the back by the compost*, ignored until I find potatoes that are going soft (always cut them open before you toss them! If they're still white they're still good!) or score free veggie tray leftovers from a party. Then I pull one out and make myself some soup.

Making stock from scratch is one of those things an alarming number of people don't know how or are too hesitant to try to do. It's not hard, but the convenient cartons or cans of broth at the grocery store are just so much easier, and make the task of making from scratch seem, especially to a busy student, worker, or parent, really daunting and unnecessary.

Not to knock the canned stuff - we do keep a couple cartons on hand when we need something quick, and for flavors we don't really have bones around for, like beef - but while homemade may not be necessary, it is worth it. Not only is homemade stock 100% less salty (figures are just pulled out of my arse) but it has no preservatives, hasn't been pasteurized, and often has more, or an actual amount of - in the case of meat-based stocks - gelatin, which is super good for those of us with achy joints. Plus it tastes better, and is made of things you already have lying around, instead of costing you an extra $2.29.

It's like Mr. Christie VS Grandma. Christie's stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing like a homemade chocolate chip cookie, Grandma-style. Not that my grandmothers really baked chocolate chip cookies, but they did make homemade bread, and that stuff is beautiful.

Making stock is stupidly easy, too. I was going to say that GF taught me how to do it, but actually, I think it was my mother. Mom's a very "throw stuff together and hope it works" sort of cook, but she's good at it. "Mix and match" suppers and "The Great Fry-up" are specialties of hers. She also makes a damn good turkey soup. She once showed me how to make that soup, but never told me how to make the broth. I must have gleaned the technique from watching her every Christmas day.

It's like the music thing. I don't know how I know it. I just do.

Start by saving the crap everyone else tells you to throw out (unless it's fuzzy or blue or smells bad). Those almost-slimy lettuce pieces from a salad. Onion skins that aren't quite brown. Celery leaves or asparagus bottoms or the tiny roots on beet greens. If you roast a chicken or have another sort of meat product with bones, keep everything you don't eat, including the cartilage or leftover meat. You can mix the veggies and meat or keep them separate. I generally keep mine apart (in case of vegetarian guests), but I recently made a ham and pea soup with a bunch of veggies and half an apple-roasted ham as the base (plus ham I'd scavenged from the dinner table of a family get-together).

Before

Once you've got a medium-sized Ziploc bag full, dump the contents into a big pot (no need to defrost) and fill it with water. You can put as much water in as you'd like, but the more you have the more diluted your stock will be. A 2-to-1 ratio is usually good. Feel free to add bay leaves or any other spice you'd like. Turn on the stove to about medium heat and let the suckers boil!

After

(Maniacal laughter)

Depending on what you're boiling, this step could take one to five hours. Bigger animals = more time (a good analogy for digestion, by the way). Give beef bones four to five hours, pork three to four, poultry one to two, and vegetables one to two, depending on how potent you want your stock. Once your water's turned a rich colour (anywhere from gold to brown to red, if you used beets), strain your stock through a colander - or just tilt the pot while holding the lid at an angle - into another pot. TA DAA. The pretty leftover liquid is stock! You can use it right away or freeze it or... drink it, I guess.

On an ending note, for all you folks who fit the "I'm too busy" category, remember:

1) Homemade stock is free, especially if all your scraps are scavenged instead of bought.

2) Homemade stock isn't loaded with salt (unless you dump it in there) and contains lots of vitamins and minerals that the process of preserving canned stock kills off.

3) You don't have to make stock right away (although you can; Mom always started making turkey stock as soon as the bird had cooled and been picked over). Even freezer-burnt meats and vegetables make tasty stock, so you don't have to stuff soup prep into an already busy day. Wait for a lazy Sunday.

4) An excellent tip from Mom: If you're making an animal-based soup, don't put the meat in with the stock bones. Add the meat last (because it's pre-cooked anyway) during your soup construction to keep it flavorful! 

Sweet Simmering!
-Leah 

*We keep it there to avoid smells and fruit flies. The apartment is so warm in the summer that vegetables, fruit, and bread will go bad within a couple days if we keep them out of the fridge. There's such thing as silicone buckets specially made for folks with our problem, but a reused plastic bag is way cheaper than a $50 tub, thank you very much. 

Embrace Your Inner Seagull

OR

Scavenging Whenever The Opportunity Arises (And Being Prepared To Do So)

You know that saying, "You eat like a horse?"

That horse is me. I am that horse. Someone in seventeen-hundred-whatever saw into the future and called me a horse (an endearing term, I think, when horses were a main form of transportation) and made up that saying when they saw how much I eat on a daily basis. I'm not just being dramatic, either - coworkers, friends, and my grandmother have all told me I eat ridiculous quantities of food. Part of it is nutritional deficiency, I'm sure; as much as I try to eat healthy, the fact is that I'm a student making minimum wage, and vegetable are fricking expensive. Someday I'll earn above $10 an hour and get to shop the crap out of the farmer's market, but today is not that day.

Did you know that you're probably starving? Even if you're 200 pounds overweight and eat like me (the horse), your cells are probably screaming for things you're not giving them. Imagine your insides are babies. Err, wait, imagine your cells are little baby heads? This is a terrible explanation, but work with me on this. Your trillions of body cells are babies, okay? Imagine that. These babies are being little shits and making a huge racket, so you give them a cup of water to drink, because they're not pooping, so they're probably hungry. They drink the stuff (they know the importance of being hydrated, after all), but they continue to make a fuss because they want MILK, and water is not milk. But you keep giving them water. Eventually their screaming drives you berserk because they never stop (and that would get really annoying). That's kind of what happens every day when you don't eat well. Your body goes, "I want vitamin B! I want carotenoids! I want fructose that doesn't come from purple Koolaid!" and you say, "Too bad! LOL! Have some meat and overcooked broccoli and french fries!" So they make you fat. The little bastards.

If you're a person who eats "well", you're probably a bit offended right now. Sorry. But the fact is our living bodies love living food. The more raw or single-ingredient food you can plug into yourself (minus meat - it takes forever to go through your super-long digestive tract and makes your insides all acidic), the better off you'll be. I'm no raw foodie (it makes me too cold and I'm not especially fond of crunchy food), but it's well-known scientific fact that basic - and especially uncooked - fruits and veggies have more of the "milk" your guts want.

Which comes back to me being a starving student. I can't afford the living food I function best on. I eat like a horse, but only because I'm trying to pump myself with nutrients I can't get from breads and junk food. I - and my screaming baby cells - are constantly hungry. Therefore I make a point of searching out things I wouldn't be able to consume normally. If I'm eating in a restaurant I'll order something full of veggies, and make sure I take all my leftovers home if I don't finish. I'll eat off other people's plates (at my own table, okay, not just at random). I'll fill up on the fancy pre-main course bread or salad.

I grab good food anytime I get the chance. Recently I went to a family potluck, and my family is huge (my mom has 97 first cousins) so there was a lot of food made, and therefore a lot of food left over. Not only did I spend a good chunk of my time at the party standing by the dinner table eating fruit, but I purposely brought Tupperware with me to pack leftovers in. I came home with a bowl of couscous, half a ham, some chicken breast, and a full container of whatever I could snatch from the veggie tray. These things provided me with two salads, two lunches, a breakfast, and a giant pot of soup. For free.

Most times the leftovers from parties (especially staff parties) get thrown out when everyone goes home. I make an effort to be the first (and often only - what's with that?) person to ask, "Can I take some of this?"

 I am a seagull in horses' clothing. Err, fur. Whatever.

Test time! What would you pick from this spread to bring home?

When you can't afford fresh food, that food becomes a huge treat. I can grab 36 cookies for $6 at the grocery store, but a handful of blackberries costs the same amount. When you have $50 to feed two people for two weeks... well, you say "screw you" to both options and buy a $3 pack of rice. But the point remains that fruit (and for that matter, vegetables, especially when you try to buy from within your own country) is a luxury to me. So when I find myself at a function of some sort, I take what I can. I come prepared. I don't expect to get anything, but the general rule is "ask and ye shall receive". This doesn't just apply to berries, either. Sandwich quarters, chicken bones, bread, sad-looking veggies from the supermarket vegetable tray someone bought last second - all of these leftovers are perfectly good to eat. Even the yucky-looking stuff, if you know what to do with it.

Do yourself a favor, though: a leftover plate of Oreos may be delicious, but it's only going to make you sick. Junk food is the water your baby cells don't want. Whole foods - things that were pulled out of the ground or picked off a tree and don't have ingredients listed - are the kind of things you want to seek out. They are the "milk". These are the things that are good for you, and, nine times out of ten, they'll be the things that are most simple and most expensive. They are the luxury. Your body thinks of good food in the same way my Dad does: "You can have as much salad as you want." I eat like a horse, but I haven't gained weight in years.

Developed countries waste more than a third of what they buy in food. Feed yourself and help stop the waste. Eat like a horse. Be a seagull.

Step by step:

1) If you know you're going somewhere where there will be leftovers, bring containers to put them in. That may sound Crazy Old Baglady-esque, but the party hosts will be more willing to dole out scraps if they don't have to donate dishes.

2) Grab whatever you know you'll eat. Even stuff that looks shoddy. Old veggies and less than prime cuts of meat can be made into stock for soup!

3) Don't whip out the Tupperware right away. That's rude. Fill up on as many whole foods as you can during the event and ask to take things home after the food table has been mostly abandoned.

4) Grabbing free tiny tubs of butter/jam/peanut butter from restaurants is not frowned upon. If might make you look a little desperate if you scoop handfuls into your bag, but hey, it's another peanut butter toast breakfast you don't have to pay for.

Yours Hungrily,
- Leah