Sprouts!

I might have a green thumb after all, well at least growing sprouts is like following a recipe...I decided to do this based on an article I read in the most recent issue of Clean Eating magazine. Seemed easy enough, so here's the process.

Gather your ingredients. The magazine suggested you use cheese cloth, but when I was looking for seeds online, I found sprouting lids that fit on a wide mouth mason jar (with varying sizes of holes that you can change out as the sprouts grow). I don't have a pic of this, but the first step is to soak 2T seeds for 8-10 hours. You can add citric acid to the soaking water in order to limit bacteria growth. I've now done 2 batches of seeds and have found that with the citric acid, things don't grow as quickly. Of note, you can use the soaking liquid for your other plants (but don't use it if it has citric acid in it...my lucky bamboo is not looking so good right now, maybe my green thumb should be revoked?).

Once the seeds have soaked, rise with warm water and prop screen side down to allow ventilation and drainage.

Continue to rinse seeds with warm water twice daily.

Once the seeds start to sprout, you can switch the lid to one with larger holes. Now the sprouts won't come out, but the hulls of the seeds will.

Grow, grow, grow

Once they get large enough, you pour out your sprouts into a large bowl of cold water to wash and stop the growing process. Fish out the rest of the seed hulls then drain on a towel. Once dry, put back in your jar with a venting lid and place in the fridge. These guys don't last very  long - a few days max. If you have ever bought sprouts from the store, you probably already know this.

Here are the little sprouts! I had a 3 seed mix with alfalfa, radish and broccoli. The whole process is pretty quick - 4ish days (including soaking). Since they don't last long after sprouting, you could have jars in different phases of growth so you could have sprouts all the time. If you really like sprouts, that is. For now, I'm doing 1 jar at a time and using them in salads...now on the hunt for recipes that use sprouts! Anyone have any suggestions?