[RawFoodGrl]

Yeah, I hear you on the chick peas. I CANNOT STAND the taste of sprouted beans. That's my biggest reason for eating as much cooked food as I do (little though it may be). I like cooked beans , but don't like them raw. I've been trying different kinds, so maybe I'll find one I like. But for now I'm eating cooked beans, cooked tofu, cooked tempeh, cooked seitan.

With the beans, it might help to not just soak them overnight, but then let them sprout. You do that by leaving them in the jar, then rinsing them a couple times a day, and in a few days they start getting a tail. Same thing with grains.

With the oats, be sure you're getting truly raw oats. Most oats have been processed to the point they will not sprout.

About dehydrating stuff - the original way was to let the sun naturally dry it. So, you could cover some fruit in cheesecloth to keep the insects off, then put it in the sun and let the sun do it's thing. While it might be harder to make something like fruit leather or a granola bar, you could certainly make a trail mix with sprouted and sun-dried grains and fruit. I'm thinking of a cereal I'm eating right now - it's buckwheat, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and qunioa. (It also has cinnamon in it as it's a breakfast cereal, but you could leave that out.) Add some dried fruit and you'll have something handy for hiking.

Another thought I had is that if you can keep the foods reasonably cool, whole foods really do last quite a long time, especially if you wait to cut it until you actually use it. If you get some hard-sided containers (to keep things from getting squashed and goopy), you could bring avocado, lettuce, zucchini, tomatoes - all kinds of things. Sprouts would be fine for the first couple days. Nori or other seaweed can give you some of the salts and minerals you'd need to replentish from all the sweating. Of course your superfoods will handle the trip quite well.

On road trips I always bring my own foods, rarely bring an ice chest or ice, and I'm always pleasantly surprised how well whole foods hold up to the journey.



Here's a sprouting list - conveniently I just put it into a spreadsheet recently, so it's easy to paste it here for you. Looks pretty messy, but hopefully you can figure it out. I'll see if I can do something to make it easier to read.....


If you copy this into Word (or a word processing program) and replace the asterick (*) with a tab, it'll become quite legible.



Plant Variety*Soaking Hours*Daily Rinses*Approx Sprouting Length in inches*Growing time in Days
Alfalfa*4-6*4*1-2*3-5
Amaranth*4-6*3*0-1/4*2-3
Anise*4-6*5*1*2
Beans, Most*8-10*3*1*3-5
Barley*8-10*3*0*3
Buckwheat*4-6*2*1/2*3
Cabbage*4-6*2*1-2*3-5
Chickpeas*10-12*3*1/2*3
Chia*4-6*5*1/4*2-3
Clover*4-6*5*1-1/2*4-5
Corn*8-10*2*1/2*3
Flax*5-7*3*1-2*4
Fenugreek*4-6*5*2-3*3-5
Green Peas*10-12*4*1/2*2-3
Lentils*6-8*3*1/4-1/2*3-4
Millet*6-8*3*0-1/8*2
Mung Beans*8-10*2*1-2*3-5
Mustard*4-6*2*1-1/2*4
Nuts, Most*8-12*2*0*1
Onion*4-6*3*1-2*3-5
Oats*8-10*2*0-1/4*3
Radish*4-6*2*1*3-5
Rye*8-10*4*0-1/4*3-4
Rice*8-10*3*0*3
Pumpkin Seeds*6-8*3*0-1/8*1-2
Sesame Seeds*4-6*4*0*1
Sunflower Seeds*6-8*2*0-1/8*1-2
Soybeans*10-12*5*1/2-1*3-4
Watercress*4-6*4*1*3-5
Wheat*10-12*4*0-1/8*2-3
Quinoa*4-6*4*0-1/16*2-3


Just another quick note - chia and flax get goopy when you soak/sprout them, so they cannot be sprouted the same way you'd sprout other nuts, seeds, and grains. I soak them in a bowl with a bit of water if I need something soaked, and if I am sprouting for sprouts (like alfalfa sprouts, but with chia), I actually have one of those Chia Pets (mine is a tree) which works great.

Alternately, you can get a new, clean terra cotta saucer for potted plants, and then put that in a larger container - we use a glass pie pan - and keep that filled with water, then mist the sprouts from time to time.