My hemp sprouting bags arrived this week, so I wanted to give you a little update on the whole sprouting project. I ordered two bags, plus dried green peas, broccoli seeds and sunflower seeds, from the good people at Raw Guru. They say hemp breathes and dries even better than cotton or linen, and is naturally antibiotic, so it's the perfect environment for sprouting. That website is a real rabbit hole for me, I can get lost for way too long poring over dehydrators and sprouters and raw agave and virgin coconut oil...yet another resource from which I can obsessively stock the larder. Anyhoo, I "sterilized" the bags per the instructions by dousing them with boiling water and then, after soaking a cup of peas and a couple of tablespoons of broccoli seeds in two clean jars filled with water for about 6 hours, I poured them into the bags. And there they hang.

You have to soak the bags about twice a day, to keep a nice m***t environment going for the germination, and then, suddenly, you have sprouts. Allegedly. I'm always a bit suspicious of my ability to get this stuff right, especially after failing so miserably to get my sourdough starter going. But I am going to attempt that again just as soon as the weather warms up a bit. And I invest in that grain grinder. (I have managed to make pickles and sauerkraut. And pancetta.)

Isn't it easier just to buy organic sprouts in their little plastic containers at the store? you ask a tad peevishly. Funny, because G asked the same thing. He wanted to know how much I'd paid for those seeds. But a key factor in all this is freshness. You want to eat sprouts when they're full of all that gorgeous chlorophyll and solar energy straight from the source, as it were. The ones in the store are already middle-aged; they've been handled and subjected to fluorescent lights and god knows what else. Sprouts from home are pristine, newborn and virtually overflowing with nutrition. I need this youth juice, at any price. Stay tuned for photos of actual sprouts. The little suckers should be popping up any day now...