SPROUT SALAD

What You Need

1 cup of snow pea sprouts (my favorite)
1/2 cup of radish or mustard sprouts
1 cup of alfalfa sprouts
1/2 cup of chicory or other lettuce in large pieces
1/2 bunch of watercress
A few fresh edible flowers (optional)
8 slices of tepenyak-grilled tofu

Here’s How

Wash and dry your sprouts carefully and wrap them in a tea towel. Place them in the refrigerator for 15 minutes or more to crisp up while you prepare the other ingredients. Then place everything but the tofu in a bowl, pour a garlicky vinaigrette or a rich avocado dressing over the raw vegetables and toss gently. Add the tofu slices on top and serve immediately decorated with an edible flower or two if you have them in the garden.

Eat sprout salads often. It can change your life. Seeds and grains are latent powerhouses of nutritional goodness and life energy. They are plants at the point of greatest vitality. When you sprout and eat them this vitality gets transmitted to you. As a seed sprouts, enzymes which have been dormant spring into action. The starches within the seeds are converted into natural sugars, proteins becomes amino acids and peptones and crude fats are broken down into fatty acids. In effect the sprouting process predigests the food for you, turning these seeds into foods which are very easily assimilated by your body when you eat them. Because of the massive enzyme release that occurs when a seed or grain is sprouted, the nutritional quality of a sprout is extremely good. These enzymes not only naturalize such factors as trypsin inhibitors but also destroy any other substances present which might be harmful.

Sprouts have many times the nutritional value of the seeds from which they have grown. They provide more nutrients gram for gram than any natural food known. During the sprouting process the vitamin content of seeds increases dramatically. The vitamin C content in soya beans multiplies five times within three days of germination for instance. A mere tablespoon of soya bean sprouts contains half the recommended daily adult requirement of this vitamin. The vitamin B2 in an oat grain rises by 1300 per cent almost as soon as the seed germinates and by the time tiny leaves have formed it has risen to 2000 per cent. Some sprouted seeds and grains are believed to have anticancer properties which is why they form an important part in natural methods of treating the disease.

Each kind of sprout offers a unique combination of nutritional power as well as other specific characteristics for health and healing. All sprouts are rich in the newly discovered phytochemicals and nutraceuticals that have significant antiaging capacities. Take alfalfa for instance – the most readily available and probably the best known. This little plant of Arabic origins has roots so long that they can reach as far as 100 feet into the earth. This gives alfalfa a remarkable ability to absorb minerals from the earth and bring them to us in an instantly usable form. The health-enhancing properties of alfalfa sprouts were first discovered by men who gave them to their horses and found that doing so increased both speed and strength. Like most sprouted seeds and grains, alfalfa is rich in the carotenoids, vitamin C and E as well as chlorophyll and the xanthophylls and it contains saponins which have been shown to lower cholesterol levels and help prevent arteriosclerosis. Finally, alfalfa is rich in the phyto-oestrogens – gentle plant steroids which help protect against the body’s uptake of dangerous chemical oestrogenic herbicides and pesticides in our environment that wreak havoc with our reproductive health.

Most seeds and grains are cheap and readily available in supermarkets or health food stores – chickpeas, brown lentils, snow peas, mung beans, wheat grains and so forth. Since you can sprout them yourself with nothing but clean water, they become an easily accessible source of organically grown fresh vegetables, even for city dwellers. In an age when most vegetables and fruits are grown on artificially fertilized soils and treated with hormones, fungicides, insecticides, preservatives and all manner of other chemicals, the home-grown-in-a-jar sprouts emerge as a pristine blessing – fresh, unpolluted and ready to eat in a minute by popping them into salads or sandwiches. But seeds can be a lot of fun to sprout too. And you can grow them just about anywhere – even in the windowsill of your kitchen. Once germinated you can keep sprouts in polythene bags in the fridge for up to a week – just long enough to get a new batch ready for eating. (See BASICS for how to sprout your own seeds.)

The trick to making a great sprout salad is to mix these light-as-air vegetables with something richer and creamier such as a good mayonnaise or avocado dressing then spike them with something larger and crunchier – say chicory or julienned carrots or even apples. This way you create pretty amazing combinations of textures and colors. Be creative with your sprout salads – use whatever you have but not too many different sprouts at once.