Things that go CRUNCH

If you are the type of cruiser that might spend 4 weeks in an uninhabited atoll, then an additional 2 weeks in an inhabited atoll but anchored 35 miles away from the village, you…well, you would be us, and you would be out of fresh food.

Even with a bag of groceries kindly carried to us from the village by SV Cariba, we have entered the dried goods stage of our provisioning. At this point we start desperately craving green things, and things that have a satisfying fresh *crunch*.

This is why we sprout. We have traditionally sprouted salad sprouts in jars but we found that our sprouting seeds did not do so well shut up in the tropical heat in a boat on the hard for 3 months and so we have branched out into lentil sprouts. Lentils are easily available and made a medium thick delicious sprout.

We put an inch or two of lentils in a jar with mesh at the lid and soak them in water overnight. Then we drain the water and go into a routing of rinsing and draining the sprouts twice a day, morning and night. For the rinse we put a small amount of water in the now mostly dry sprouts, swish it around, and then let put the jars upside down in the sink until they have drained thoroughly.

The lentils can be eaten as soon as they the first bit of tail starts sprouting out (as pictured) or you can wait up to a week for long tails. They taste different at different stages, so experiment.