Just a couple more days until I can try out our new cast iron manual wheat grass juicer and find out if I can stomach its grassy flavor. I hope so. This is so packed with nutrients, it’s insane. I’m reading that my good friend, cinnamon, can remove the after taste and make wheat grass juicing a more pleasant experience. We shall see!
An amazing compliment to our farm fresh eggs is our homegrown dill. It’s one of my favorite herbs we grow and goes so well with fish and eggs. What we see here is the product of growing densely seeded dill seeds in two different one gallon grow bags over the winter, in our basement, under a 27 watt LED panel. Cut and hung upside down in our basement, this dill is going to be harvested and stored in empty glass herb containers when it is all ready. So easy and delicious!!
Genesis 1:29
Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
Move over lettuce and make room for the better sandwich green, radish microgreens! One of my favorite things about sharing our microgreens with friends is seeing how they end up consuming them. How does this lunch look to you?
Lightly toasted multigrain bread with a little mustard, several slices of deli turkey with a slice of baby swiss, this delightful open face sandwich gets a burst of color from the daikon radish microgreens on top. I’m a big fan of radish microgreens on sandwiches because their quintessential radish spiciness really comes thru in a pleasing after taste. Complimented with a few wavy potato chips and some stuffed green olives, and you’ve got a winner for your dinner!
Would you delight in having this as your mid-day meal? Comment below.
Look at this savory salad a friend of ours made with the broccoli and radish microgreens we gave to her to try! I think she nailed it. Thank you so much for sharing your creation with us at Sustainable Roots!
I know our friends have backyard chickens, so it is safe to assume that the hard boiled eggs are farm fresh. Crumbled feta and red pepper not only add to the flavor profile but really enhance this salad’s visual appeal.
If you’ve tried pealing hard boiled eggs made from farm fresh eggs, you know how hard they can be to peal. The store bought eggs are much older, and the inside of the egg has had enough time to pull away from the shell, which helps in their pealing but diminishes its flavor. Just recently we acquired the Farber brand of the popular InstantPot, and one thing owners of this kitchen device rave about is how great the hard boiled eggs are. We gave it a try with our own farm fresh eggs, and I can attest that this is an amazing way to make hard boiled eggs. Perhaps some day I’ll elaborate on this process here in Humbleville.
And now there will be many more. Last November we shared with you the beginnings of the seed production from an uneaten Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce plant we grew under LED lights in the basement.
Last weekend we took to harvesting the small lettuce seeds for future production. Just a few lettuce plants taken completely through their life-cycle produced enough seed for us to enjoy literally hundreds of head of lettuce over the next couple of years. The Lord provides!!
The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.
I’m not sure one can grow microgreens and not at least be a little curious about growing wheat grass, and so here we are starting to grow wheat grass. The nutritional information on broccoli microgreens is very impressive, but reading up on the health benefits of routine and modest amounts of wheat grass juice is astounding.
Step one was to find a source of wheat berries. Yes, that’s what they’re called. Wheat berries. I had to ask the stock ladies at Walmart if they stocked them, and after checking in the rice isle, the isle that carried wheat germ and an isle that had some specialty grains like bulgar, we had to give up. She was still happy to learn that the seeds used to grow wheat are called wheat berries. Next stop; Amazon.
It’s only now that I realize that the juicer I already own would be insufficient to juice wheat grass. So, second step is to procure an economy, cast iron manual juicer. That was found on clearance from Walmart online for $40 delivered, and it showed up a week earlier than expected!
Third step is to soak a cup of wheat berries overnight in a mason jar. Drain it the next morning, and the rinse and drain about every 12 hours, keeping the jar tipped upside down in a bowl in the dark with a mesh lid for a day or so until you see little white tails sticking out of the wheat berries (see picture below).
In the fourth step, we spread them out evenly over about a half inch of garden soil and keep in the dark while it grows initially, then in light to green it up. Once the wheat grass is grown, I’m going to trim it and juice it. Yes, you can let it grow back and re-cut it a second time, but we probably wouldn’t continue to grow the same tray after that.
One and a half pounds of freshly harvested sunflower shoots, covered in liquid aminos, nutritional yeast, olive oil and just a hint of cayenne pepper made for a delicious snack after hours of dehydrating at 105 degrees F. It filled the house with an odd asian food smell that wasn’t entirely unwelcoming.
Any guess as to how much 1.5 pounds of sunflower microgreens would reduce to in a dehydrator? 5.8 ounces. That’s a pretty good amount of water weight that was taken out of the product during the process. It wasn’t quite as crispy as I would have thought. Maybe I used a little too much oil; maybe I hadn’t dehydrated quite as long as I should have. Regardless this is still quite the tasty snack, and the aftertaste is better than the initial bite.
Click: Article on Making the Sunflower Snacks
Psalm 107:9
For he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.
If you’re following a ketogenic diet, you know that about 75-80% of your calories should come from fat, about 20% from protein and then ultra-low carbohydrates. Additionally, recent studies support the idea the egg consumption to get one’s protein aids in weight loss more than other forms of protein. Given that, I thought I would share with you a ketogenic breakfast that I thoroughly enjoy.
First I start with generous amount of Kerrigold grass-fed butter (actually it is the cows that are fed grass; the butter isn’t fed anything) to saute some of our nutritious and delicious broccoli microgreens. Pound for pound, broccoli microgreens are shown to have 4-6 times the nutritional content as the same weight of full grown broccoli !!
Next I take two farm fresh eggs and scramble them up with a touch of water. I add small bits of cream cheese and then pour that into the hot pan with the saute’d broccoli micros. A little bit of salt; a little bit of pepper. Cook the scrambled eggs as normal. When they are nearly complete I lay out strips of cheddar cheese to melt on top. Plate it, a few sprinkles of your favorite hot sauce and topped with radish microgreens, and you are ready for a keto-friendly healthy breakfast. ENJOY !!
Today’s experiment is to turn a pound and a half of freshly grown sunflower shoots into a tasty snack with the aid of a dehydrator. We’ve enjoyed making kale chips in this fashion with excess kale from our Square Foot Garden, so why not apply this technique to nutritious sunflower microgreens?
I’m sure I’ll have to tweak the recipe, but a fellow microgreen grower shared that he does this all the time with his left over sunnies and people love them. For one version he uses Liquid Aminos (a gluten free alternative to soy sauce), nutritional yeast (gives it a cheesy flavor) and a bit of olive oil and a dash of cayenne pepper. After the sunnies are fully dressed, they are place on the dehydrator at 105 degrees F for hours until they become crisp.
Any guesses as to what the after dehydrating weight will be? Comment below. It’ll be fun !!
Psalm 37:2
For they will wither quickly like the grass And fade like the green herb.
Reading up on the nutritional benefits of consuming wheatgrass juice, I’m convinced it is even more beneficial to one’s body than our broccoli microgreens. So we got the wheat berries, and already have the growing equipment. The only thing left we had to acquire to get this experiment going was a manual juicer.
The highly fibrous wheat grass, apparently, won’t juice well in our traditional juicer. Fortunately I found a cast iron juicer online on clearance marked down to $40 including shipping. That’s not too high of a hurdle for good nutrition, so I am rolling the dice thinking this may be something we will incorporate into our diets.
The first step is to soak the wheat berries overnight. Then for a couple of days we will rinse and drain and keep them in darkness until they start to sprout. After that, we transfer then into one of our growing trays with minimal soil, watering them daily and watching it grow. We should be able to get “two cuts” from the wheat grass tray, meaning after we cut and consume it the first time, we can leave it to grow back another time.
Stay tuned … I should be posting about the end result in about a week or two!
