Ideally you don’t cook sprouts. The point of them as that contain living enzymes and vitamins which are reduced upon cooking. But I’d mixed quinoa which sprouts almost as soon as it gets wet in a sprout bag with neutered barley, and not wanting to eat raw unsprouted barley cooked the whole lot in this mornings porridge. The texture was magnificent. The barley (soaked for several days first) was chewy with a plump grape mouth feel, whilst the quinoa with their 5ml long tadpole tails maintained their mild crunch even after a 7 minute simmer. Next time I would add these sprouts raw. A date and half a banana cooked, coconut milk, coconut-syrup, and the other half banana added fresh all helped to create a thai-desert tasting vegan breakfast porridge with a comfortable blend of creamy chewiness.
The Soul of Porridge
March 28, 2010
I feel like such a predator harvesting the leaves off the lettuces you planted for me , says my sister Susan who only last week became a vegetarian. All food has an energetic resonance according to my friend Wendy who has recently trained as a raw food chef in California. Carrots have been proven to communicate with each other across a field, she told me and the energy surrounding their cultivation carries through to whoever consumes them. Jain’s – the vegetarian wanderers of India who use a peacock feather to sweep insects away from the impending doom of their footseps would not eat a carrot; they do not eat vegetables in which the plant needs to be killed for their sustenance , according to William Dalrymple in his interview with Jain Monk Prasanamati Mataji in the book Nine Lives.
Life is Life eating life; says Jospeh Campbell – and many rituals have grown up around hunters( and gatherers) being forced to accept this fact everytime they kill a plant or animal. Explorer Sir George Grey’s describes in his 1830 journal (recorded in Songlines by Bruce Chatwin) the dance of an Aborigine hunting a kangaroo:
“his graceful movements, cautious advance, the air of quietude and repose which pervade his frame when his prey his alarmed, all involuntarily call forth your imagination and compel you to murmur to yourself, ‘How beautiful! How very beautiful!'”
Wwoofing on an organic farm in Chiba japan, by instruction, my friend Yoko and I would cut back the leaves of the weeds growing up around the heritage rice, careful not to disrupt the integrity of the soil crust with all its life forms, apologizing for the cut then thanking the weeds for providing green mulch to warm and shelter the emerging seedlings.
Awareness, consciousness, love and kindness arise from our relationships with food.
Today I am soaking oat groats hoping to sprout my own porridge on my Hong Kong balcony which I will respect in the spirit of the Jain ( whisking ants clear with my peacock feather), fertilize with the love of a Japanese organic farmer, and harvest with the poise, grace and beauty of Sir George Grey’s Aborigine – saying a prayer of gratitude as I eat the porridge.
Porridge 