Cooking with sprouts

After using raw sprouts in salads and sandwiches, I decided to try making something called a "St. Paul" sandwich which I'd seen on a PBS show called "Sandwiches You Will Like". The video was based on a sandwich tour around the U.S. to find great local sandwiches. Anyway, the St. Paul sandwich is an egg foo young patty on white bread with lettuce, tomato, and mayo. The egg foo young is traditionally deep fried, but I just pan fried it. I started by stir-frying diced onions and sprouts. Once ready, form 2 sandwich-size disks of onions and sprouts in the pan. Beat 2 eggs, add some soy sauce and pepper. Over medium heat, pour egg mixture over each sprout/onion disk and use spatula to form patties as it sets. The only thing that it's missing is some spicy sauce. Cheap and healthy! Take it easy on the mayo!!

Sprouting

I am really excited about my latest project...sprouting!! So economical, so nutritious, so easy! I had some mason jars lying around so all I needed was some beans and stainless steel filter tops and voila! The attached pictures were taken 24 hours after the initial soaking and 12 hours after the first rinsing. I was surprised to learn that sprouts are much more nutricious than the original bean/seed. They even have their own enzymes so they kind of digest themselves so you get the full energy potential of this miracle food. With this kind of simple sprouting system, after the initial soak, you just rinse them under the tap twice a day...so easy! I bought 2 pounds for $4. What you see is about 3 times the volume of the original beans and they haven't even started sprouting yet and that was only a small portion of the total I have. The green ones are mung beans, the red ones are adzuki beans, and the others are lentils of course. I vaguely remember learning about sprouts in grade school in some experiment. So typical of our lame public school system to not emphasize the useful aspect of things. If you are interested in trying sprouting yourself, check out sproutpeople.com for equipment and instructions.

Update: The top photo shows the sprouts after 3 mornings following the initial soaking (see other photos). I started Monday night and this is what I have Friday morning. Keep in mind that I started with a little over an inch of each in 3 mason jars. I had to expand to 6 jars to deal with the expansion. That doesn't include the jar I ate in a salad and 2 sandwiches already. The growth really exceeded my expectations! I'm buying a salad spinner tonight because it's time to harvest and store them.