Category: Food

I’m an experienced sprouter, and I’ve meant to experiment with sprouted wheat bread for a long time, but I never got around to it until today. Why sprouted wheat? The grain is much more nutritious after it’s sprouted, and it’s said to have other healthy virtues. The bread turned out very good — surprisingly light with a moist crumb and chewy texture.

I used a quart of sprouts (having started with a cup of wheat kernels). I ground the sprouts very thoroughly in the food processor. After grinding, they looked pretty much like dough made from whole wheat flour. To that I added half a cup of water with the yeast, about three-quarters of a cup of King Arthur whole wheat flour, and about half a cup of flax seed meal. I’ve included pictures to show that the dough looked, and behaved, pretty much the same as whole wheat flour.

In the sprouting jar

Ready for the food processor

Kneaded

Rising

Fresh greens are among the best bargains in the grocery store during the winter. This huge mess of turnip greens cost 99 cents.

Dry toasting

How lucky for us that, as a rule, the cheapest foods are also the healthiest. Think: beans, onions, cabbage, squash, most grains, and so on. A cheap and healthy food that is very much neglected is the humble pumpkin seed. Google for “pumpkin seeds” to read up on what they have to offer.

A good rule of grocery shopping is that any food that can be bought in bulk should be bought in bulk. Ironically, Whole Foods, an expensive grocery store, is one of the few stores (in this area, at least) that sells certain staples in bulk. They have pumpkin seeds, along with a nice assortment of nuts and grains. Even nuts, when bought in bulk, are relatively cheap.

But what does one do with pumpkin seeds? They are sometimes sold pre-processed as a snack, roasted and salted. But that’s neither cheap nor healthy. Lately I’ve been dry-toasting them in a pan, grinding them in a small grinder, and using them generously as a topping for things like vegetable and pasta dishes. Add some food yeast and a little salt and you’ve got a nice, toasty topping that can be used like grated parmesan — but the pumpkin seeds are much cheaper and much healthier.

Grinding them saves a lot of chewing!

Pumpkin curry

I am shocked how many people tell me that they buy only canned pumpkin and never cook pumpkin fresh. It’s easy to cook pumpkin in the oven. Just cut the pumpkin in half, scrape the center clean of seeds and strings, and bake the pumpkin on a cookie sheet until it’s tender. A big pumpkin will need up to an hour and a half in the oven at 325 to 350 degrees. When the pumpkin is done, let it cool. Then scrape the pumpkin out with spoon, leaving the empty pumpkin shell (and the seeds and strings) for the chickens.

Pumpkin is just too cheap and too nutritious not to use when it’s in season. It’s good for many things other than pies. Search the web, and you’ll get lots of ideas for recipes.

The pumpkin just came out of the oven.

Over many months, I have continued to experiment with biscuits. The objective is to make a great biscuit, reasonably true to the Southern standard for good biscuits, but as low-carb as possible, with the lowest possible glycemic index. Flax seed, with which I started experimenting well over a year ago, is only part of the answer, I think. Flax seed, for all its health benefits, tends to make bread gummy if you use too much of it. So how might one counteract the gumminess of flax seed meal?

The best way I’ve found so far is to add soy flour. The caky characteristic of soy flour seems to counteract the gumminess of flax seed meal, giving the biscuit a very satisfactory texture, not only when served hot, but also when served cold.

Here are the proportions I’ve settled on for now, and the proportions I used for the biscuits in the photo above: 1 and 1/3 cup King Arthur whole wheat flour; 1/3 cup flax seed meal; and 1/2 cup soy flour. The biscuits are shortened with coconut oil. I used soy milk, clabbered with a teaspoon of vinegar.

The barley experiments continue. Barley has a chewiness and heartiness that works nicely in fried patties. The barley burgers above are simple: cooked pearl barley, bound with an egg and whole-wheat bread crumbs and seasoned with chopped onions. I think they’d make a nice breakfast patty if they were seasoned like sausage. That will be the next experiment.

The barley itself was cooked several days ago and stored in the refrigerator. Barley takes a long time to cook, so I like to use a pressure cooker. One part barley to three parts vegetable stock is about right. I leave it in the pressure cooker for about an hour. You want it to soak up as much liquid as possible, with no liquid remaining in the bottom of the pot when the barley is done.

Again, why barley? Because, of all the grains, barley takes the longest to digest and so has a low glycemic index. It sticks to the ribs.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned barley as a nice way to thicken soups. An even easier way, because it’s something most of us have in our kitchens, is to use a handful of oatmeal.

The soup in the photo is a cream of onion soup, made with soy milk. I threw in some leftover rice and some leftover peas. With soy milk, rich, creamy soups can have zero cholesterol. The combination of oats and rice makes a nice, hearty soup.