Making our food more Digestible

Ever heard that eating healthy is expensive?  IT IS!  Holy hannah!  In an effort to save money, I started looking into beans.  Not only are they inexpensive dry, but they are a great substitute for meat.

PROBLEM!  Sorry, but I have to say it.  Beans make our home one stinky place.  Oh. My. Goodness.  I'm sure I don't need to elaborate any further.

Briefly, our bodies have a hard time breaking beans down.  They get stuck in our intestines where they begin to ferment, causing a build up of gas which we release.  Not good.

One way to combat this is to sprout your beans.  Essentially, you allow the bean to sprout, to grow another bean before you eat it.  For more information, click here.  Basically, you soak the item over night, then you rinse and keep damp for the next 1-3 days, rinsing once every 12 hours, until the little sprouts form.  Its pretty easy.  To date, I've sprouted brown rice, chickpeas, black beans, oats and lentils (I think).

Do they taste different?  I'd be lying if I said no, but not too noticeable.  Does it help with the fermentation?  Yes.  Yes, it does.  I defiantly have noticed when I've eaten canned beans, as opposed to sprouted beans.

When I was reading about sprouting, I also read that you should soak your nuts, too.  Okay, are you done giggling? hee hee.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  The other day, I decided to do just that and soaked our raw almonds over night.  After soaking, I dehydrated them in our oven.  Yum!  These tasted so much better than unsoaked almonds.  The flavor was more developed and they weren't as mushy, if you could describe a nut that way.  Okay, I think I should just call this topic done.  Eek! hahaha


I'm interested in whether or not anyone else sprouts/soaks their foods to improve digestibility.  Does it work for your family?

Adventures in Sprouting: Chickpeas

There is a nutritional school of thought known as essential eating.  Briefly, the idea is to eat only real foods and in their most nutritious form.  This means buying organic and eating your legumes and grains in a sprouted form.  The idea is that when you sprout legumes and grains, they become easier to digest and increase their nutritional value.  If you want more information, click here or here.

Since P and I have decided to reduce our animal consumption, we need to increase our consumption of legumes for their protein.  One of our favorites is garbanzo beans, aka chickpeas.  I have a recipe for a chickpea curry that I really wanted to try, and I want to make some hummus, so I figured I would give this sprouting a try.

2 days ago, I opened a bag of Full Circle Organic Dried Garbanzo Beans, rinsed and then soaked them for 12 hours.

Next, I rinsed them in a colander and laid them in a pyrex baking dish, still moist, and set them in my oven so they'd be out of the way.

12 hours after that, I came to give them another rinse when I noticed that my garbanzo beans had sprouted.  WooHoo!

As P said, I am really boring.  This has truly excited me.  They are cutie patooties; chickpeas with little white tails.

I also have black beans that are currently in the oven, hopefully sprouting.  Every 12 hours, I will rinse them and drop them back in the dish.  I'm hoping that in another 36 hours, they will be as beautiful as my chickpeas.

Oh, and let me not forget my brown rice.  I soaked them overnight and now, they too have little white buds on the ends, too.  I feel like a sprouting queen princess.  Those black beans are still iffy.  I'm going to store my babies in the fridge for 3-5 days in an airtight container.

Next, I am going to try to sprout some wheat berries and make my own sprouted bread.  Now, to find some more time....