Making soup!

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First, thanks all for the recipes! I didn't go "hog-wild" with my preps, but I do have more beans than I will probably use in my lifetime. Well, I won't let them go to waste.

Second, I vastly prefer fresh or frozen veggies to canned. They just don't taste as good to me. But, being responsible for the nutrition of a family, I stored away plenty of canned veggies. Sunday, I made a big batch of soup, added 5 cans of various veggies to 5 quarts of stock and let it simmer all afternoon. Good! Looks like we're going to be having lots of soup this spring!

-- cmd0903 (cmd0903@dontcall.com), January 04, 2000

Answers

If you like fresh vegetables, I'd wager that you'd like home made beansprouts too. Not the blanched, bloated, waterlogged, tasteless, nutrition-free stuff found in the stores, but tasty, green, vitamin- packed *food* you can make from your beans.

NK has a very nice three-tray sprouter. We saw some at Walmart the other day in the garden department, it was about ten bucks, and included a big pack of seeds for sprouting.

We've got several we bought last year, we use them for beans, wheat, alfalfa, brocolli, and some mixes that NK sells. (The beans and wheat are from our bulk.)

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 04, 2000.


Ron, I have two of the NK sprouters, but the stores don't supply seeds to sprout....UGH! I have a couple of sprouting books by the Sproutman, and he's located on the web. You can order seeds for sprouting from him. Anyway, I went to Orchard Hardware and they had the seeds in the back room that they were going to throw out because they were 1999 seeds. I got 20 packets of various NK sprouting seeds for free! For my preps, the sprouters were one of the best purchases I made.

-- Bardou (Bardou@baloney.com), January 04, 2000.

Burpee sells sprouting seeds as well (www.burpee.com). The prices listed in their catalog are as follows:

Broccoli-1/4lb.-$5.00

Alfalfa-1/4lb.-$2.00

Mung Bean-1/4lb.-$2.00

Mustard-1/4lb.-$2.00

Radish-1/4lb.-$2.00



-- Deborah (infowars@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.


Bardou - do you have an URL for the Sproutman?

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), January 05, 2000.

Why pay high prices for sprouting seeds? Any dried beans in the grocery will sprout. I especially like lentels, (about 50 cents lb.) which have a spicey flavor. Mung beans at $2.00 for 1/4 lb? Gadzukes! I bought a 50 lb. bag of them from a company in Texas for $15.00 a few months ago. Do a web search on "mung beans". You'll find a cheap source.

As for a sprouter, a quart jar laid on its side with a plastic screen for a lid will work fine.

-- (sprouter@guy.com), January 05, 2000.



BigDog

sproutman.com

Be careful not to sprout seeds that are intended for gardening, though. They are treated...not for consumption until grown.

-- Kenin Marble (kenin17@yahoo.com), January 07, 2000.


Also, wheat sprouts are an excellent source of vitamins, but if your wheat has been nitrogen packed, don't expect it to sprout. A plastic tray with holes, or a tray with screen is superior to a jar. The sprouts need to be able to breathe and not to lay in any water as sometimes happens in the jar. They also tend to form into a mass in a jar and don't sprout as well. This summer I experiemented by purchasing a bamboo basket and it worked great. I have plastic trays as well, so I would switch back and forth. The results were equally as good with the bamboo, and they're very inexpensive. Usually they can be found in a Japanese market. You can hardly get better food value than sprouts.

-- Kenin Marble (kenin17@yahoo.com), January 07, 2000.

My mom makes my favorite soup/goulash:

2 packs of 13-bean mix 1-2 LARGE cans of V8 or comparible canned tomato juice (mild or spicy) 2 packs of frozen brussel sprouts (I won't eat them in anything else.) Dried onion (add to taste)

Open up cans of V8 juice or tomato juice and put in large kettle. Add dried beans, frozen brussel sprouts and dried onions into the kettle. Simmer until all beans are rehydrated and cooked, brussel sprouts are hot. Serve and eat.

This is a wonderful dish that is very filling and tasty. The brussel sprouts are actually quite good because the tomato's acid tones down the sprouts strong taste - I won't eat brussel sprouts any other way now... You might want to add some Beano though, with all the beans in the mix. Hope you enjoy! :-)

-- Deb M. (vmcclell@columbus.rr.com), January 07, 2000.


As far as buying sprouting seeds, if you live near an Asian grocery, you should be able to get mung, soy, and adzuki at a decent price. A note about the adzukis -- they seem to be more like peas (or even peanuts) than beans -- they'll send up *two* shoots -- a root, and a stalk. Don't let them get *too* long before "harvesting" them. Also, they have a pleasant flavor with just a hint of peanut, very different from mungs. The soybean sprouts are in a class of their own. Big, and very delicious "nutty" flavor.

All of them are excellent steamed, stirfried, in soups, mixed with eggs, etc.

Also, I used the mason jar/window screen method for years, but the NK trays are a lot easier. (Getting lazy in my old age. [g])

I'm planning on making a "mega-sprouter" out of two buckets so I can sprout corn, rye, wheat, and oats in bulk for our fowl.

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 08, 2000.


Bardou, you know how to shop!

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 08, 2000.


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