I’ve been cooking from scratch ever since I learned to cook along side Mother many years ago. I have been blessed to have learned from the best! We’ve never eaten very much boxed, packaged, store bought food. That was how I grew up. You raised what you ate and you didn’t go buy a box of cereal when you could make bran flakes yourself.
Some time ago I made the decision to learn how to cook everything from scratch, even things that my family didn’t make when I was a child. From creamed soups to crackers, I make it from scratch.
Even though I may not be a novice in the kitchen,the information in this post is written from a beginner’s standpoint when it comes to soaking grains and beans and includes my observations and thoughts about the process.
I have added good foods to our diet and taken away not so good. I added kefir to our diet a few months ago. I took away non-organic fruit and vegetables. We eat pretty much in season foods now, what we grow or can purchase locally. That wasn’t too difficult to do. It was harder to find good meat around here. I buy organic elk from the Amish and we buy a half of a hog that was raised organically and butchered locally most years. If we eat beef, right now I buy a brand called Laura’s. Its expensive, and probably not the very best, but its the best I can afford right now. I have yet to find a good, steady source of healthy chicken. I buy wild caught salmon from Kroger. It is only $4.99 per pound if you use a Kroger card. That’s affordable for me, so when I buy it I buy several packages and freeze it.
We grow a lot of our vegetables and eat them in season. However, I do enjoy canning so I can tomatoes and beans and freeze broccoli from the garden. Most of the time though, if a vegetable is not in season, we don’t eat it.
Those are just a few of the changes I’ve made in the past 10 years or so.
I find myself finally understanding that more changes have to be made so that we can be healthy and so that our children can have a healthier life as they get older. I can’t stand the idea of my children becoming diabetic or obese because of the choices I made for them when they were young.
Getting rid of processed cheese and canned soups is one thing, and a good thing … but there are many more ways to improve a diet that are available to all of us.
One of those changes is the soaking of grains and flours and the sprouting of beans. I put a bowl of pinto beans in water to sprout and make chili with this week. I am going to experiment with soaking my whole wheat flour before I make bread today, too. 
Sprouting beans is supposed to accomplish two things; the growing plant causes the body to digest the bean as a vegetable and gives an increase in enzymes and vitamins. The method involves soaking the beans in water with some kind of mild acid like vinegar, then rinsing the beans and allowing them to sprout. You rinse the beans every day for about 3 days til they start to sprout, then you use them as you normally would.
It sort of makes me chuckle to myself to think of all these years that I’ve left beans on the counter in water for two or three days accidentally, then used them anyway and hoped they’d be OK.
Its really not much trouble for the return in nutrition. I sure hope my family likes the taste so that I can add this to our regular menus. I have often soaked beans before cooking but without the addition of an acid like vinegar or lemon juice. The sprouted pintos are cooking right now. When I get the pintos sprouted and the chili made, I will share the pictures with you.
The next thing I am trying is soaking whole grain flours. Soaking flour basically makes the flour more easily digested and the nutrients in the flour more available to the body. Whole grains contain phytic acid which inhibits the absorption of minerals like zinc, copper, iron, magnesium and calcium when the grain is ingested. I soaked the flour for the boule bread pictured here for 7 hours in water with a dollop of kefir.
This isn’t the end of my quest to prepare healthy meals.
This is just one more step on the way. I am thankful for my background in traditional foods and from-scratch cooking and baking. That gave me a solid foundation to work from. But there is a lot more out there that that I’m looking forward to trying.
Are there kinds of cooking or methods that you would like to try that you have not used yet? Are there changes in your diet that you would like to make this year? What changes have you made in the past that are positive and have been good for you and your family?
