Sprout Doubt

Last spring, I attempted to sprout seeds at home.  Caught up in the romance of nutrition-rich home-grown vegetables, I imagined myself like some pioneerswoman, supplementing our winter diet with a steady rotation of different sprouts.

For my first attempt, I tried mustard seed, brown rice, and black-eyed peas.  The mustard seed never did anything but sit sadly in its jar.  The rice and peas both sprouted - the beans quite nicely.  

In order to sprout seeds, they need to be soaked for several hours.  Then, they need to be kept moist but clean for several days.  This requires rinsing them a couple times a day to prevent spoilage.  It was the required regular rinsing that spurred disaster.  Running late one morning, I didn't have time to rinse my sprouts before school... and really, I thought they'd be fine.  By the time I got home, however, they had gone bad.  Ugh, the smell.

Seeds vary in how long they take to sprout as well as how often they need to be rinsed.  I used the Rodale's Basic Natural Foods Cookbook as a reference.  This cookbook is one of my favorite procedural books for handling raw foods.  It also has a lot of excellent recipes (although for my tastes many of them are under-salted).  This was also the book that taught me how to can foods as a teenager and so my copy is tie-dyed with various berry, tomato, and vegetable juices.  

Camping Disaster: rancid lamb may look pretty but tastes baaad

So I like cooking and am generally not too bad at it, but I've had a few disasters of my own over the years. There was the time when I was 11 and thought the angel food cake looked and smelled done after 15 minutes of baking and ended up with sticky goo all over the new floor, and the time I made pasta at 3 in the morning, fell asleep, and almost started my apartment on fire. I guess now I have one more cooking disaster story.

So, Ken had to go back to Chicago after a few days and I stayed behind to continue camping with my family. As we didn't use all of the lamb from the hunter's stew, the rest was left in an electric cooler for use later in the week. When my dad and I pulled the lamb out of the cooler several days later, we noticed the lamb now had a sweet and sour smell. It was clear that the meat was starting to go bad, but my dad thought that if we cooked the meat well done, the bacteria would be dead and the meat would probably be fine. So I took a deep breath of fresh air, began cleaning the lamb, and made lamb kabobs. I seasoned them very well and grilled them over a fire. They looked lovely and smelled great while they were grilling. Before serving them, Dad and I each tried a bite. At first all was good, but as you continued chewing the taste of rancid meat slowly overwhelmed the other flavors. We spit the meat out and had a lovely dinner of potatoes, broccoli, and fresh fruit instead. Oh well.