Once you start

My friend Emily has told me a lot of secrets. Usually, she tells them to me after a few glasses of wine, and usually, they involve things like the way she feels about Taylor Lautner's abs or the fact that she hasn't washed her hair for a week. But a few months ago, she divulged cold sober that she used to be the delivery girl for her parents' business—selling homegrown sprouts.

According to Emily, growing sprouts is easy, and cheap, and kind of fun. Her job was to tote the bags around to the marketplace and restaurants, walking from back doors on Main Street to the pier and up East Commercial back to town. Her parents, in the meantime, were busy filling clear containers with alfalfa seeds, and getting the growing done.

I went online the night she told me—did you know that you can order not just alfalfa sprouting seeds but also rapini broccoli sprouting seeds and green speckled peas and crimson and green lentils that will turn into sprouts as well? It was a dangerous discovery to make in the middle of the night after a few glasses of wine, but luckily, when the package arrived, there was only one small bag of plain old alfalfa sprouting seeds inside. I didn't get a chance to try them until a few weeks ago, but it's been sprout mania in this house ever since.

Here's how things work:

You arrange a layer of sprout seeds over the bottom of a clear container, like a sandwich-sized Tupperware or maybe a glass pie plate. You wet them ever so slightly, and you check on them every day. You make sure they stay moist and that they're getting plenty of sun, and in a week or two, they get huge. Your only job then is to buy some hummus, and some cheddar, and some nice sandwich bread, put a few slices in the toaster, and slap together lunch. Then, you water the next batch, make a few more sandwiches, squeal with delight, and start again.


I found out recently that you can also do the growing in a very official sprout-growing rig. My mom's friend Genie swears by hers—(once you start growing sprouts, you find out that all sorts of other people have secretly been doing it all along)—and from what I gather it has layers, sort of like stacked trays. They layers have tiny holes so that when you water the sprouts, the excess drains out, so as to keep the sprouts moist without getting them too wet.

However you decide to do things—the fancy way, or with some homemade contraption, or with plain old water and sun—be sure to take this project on. It's fun, and sort of crazy, and of course there's that stack of sandwiches to look forward to when you're done.

P.S. I have been trying to figure out how to make a homemade replacement for hummus with local beans. We have a whole heap of black turtle beans from our grain & bean csa and also a few bags of Jacob's Cattle beans from Wood Prairie Farm—so if you have any ideas, please send them along. Then we could have homegrown sprout sandwiches with locally baked bread and New England cheddar and a homemade local bean spread! I get butterflies just thinking about it.