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It has been almost two years since I have written a non-Finest Foodies Friday post on Friday on this blog! So I decided to post something simple, yet profound (for me, in any case). A few months ago I posted about Breakfast being the most important meal of the day. What I like to call my “Breakfast of Champions”.  In that post I mentioned that I soaked my grains or grasses (buckwheat/quinoa) for 24 hours before cooking them in my breakfast. The post also explains my reasons behind soaking. I got a lot of comments about how good the breakfast looked, but about how it was too time consuming with the soaking for most people to make everyday.

I have wanted to write a post addressing this for a while, so yesterday as I was doing my weekly soaking and dairy product making, Roberto reminded me that I should post about it. So here I am. Basically I am here to say that you can soak your grains, grasses and legumes and make dairy products on a weekly basis, without taking much time out of your busy schedule. In fact, doing this helps you to save time during the week, because you have food ready to go. As I was telling Amy the other day, that this is my idea of convenience food. You can check out her time saving efforts here.

Basically prep time for getting beans and grains soaking is about as long as it takes to boil a cup of water and mix it with apple cider vinegar and more water to cover. Then it does the work itself over 24 hours. If you want to take it further you can cook them to almost al dente, and then freeze them for throwing into quick meals later in the week. The beauty of that is that while they are cooking, you can be doing other things. You can even cook them in your crock pot, and you don’t even have to be home!

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The same can be said for dairy products. Every week I make yogurt, kefir and some kind of cheese. If you let your milk come to room temperature before cooking it to make these items, the whole process takes about 5 minutes. Maybe 15 for yogurt. Then you let it sit for 12-24 hours, while you are doing other things.

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This week I made creme fraiche, which is a delicious version of sour cream! It is well worth the extra few minutes in taste as well as health because you can monitor exactly what goes into it.

All you need is 2 days – and really only about an hour or two on both of those days of actual labor. If you don’t have that much time, you could break it up into ½ hour over several days. Between yesterday and the day before, I made 8 cups of homemade turkey stock in my crockpot. I also soaked chick peas, buckwheat, 2 kinds of rice and oatmeal AND I made yogurt, kefir and creme fraiche. If you can spare 2 hours a week, you can do this too! It is fun, easy, a way to save money, and much better tasting than what you can buy at the store in cans, as well as better for your health! So try it today!

To get you started on the benefits of soaking beans, grains, grasses and making your own stock, please check out: Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats

If you want to get into making dairy products, please check out: Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Delicious Cheeses

Have fun and enjoy!!!!