In the Western world, rice is hardly a major grain, at least not compared to corn or wheat, either commercially or for home production. However, rice is, worldwide, the oldest and most successful garden grain of all, and affords ample proof that the production of a major grain almost entirely from small garden farms is valid and practical. In Asia, rice has been a garden crop for at least four thousand years. The typical Asian farmer may grow a hectare or two at the most, and millions—literally millions—of families are able to live a fairly comfortable life because of rice plots smaller than that. One could say without exaggeration that the culture of most of Japan, China, India, and Southeast Asia is built on—and survives because of—a cottage rice industry. We Americans may not possess the keen Asian taste for rice, or may live where rice cannot be grown, but we can learn from rice the economies of grain gardens and how to develop a technology that serves such economies rather than a technology that forces grain production into the hands of a few human land hogs, some of whom already tell me they would rather not be called farmers anymore. (I have honored their request.)
Agriculturists might argue about which grain, rice or wheat, is the most important in the world at the present time. Certainly more people eat rice than eat wheat, but more wheat is consumed. Rice is not nearly as “commercial” as wheat. The bulk of the former is produced at home for home use. In fact, the United States, which produces only about one percent of the world’s rice, is the leading exporter of the grain! A comparison between rice growing in America and Japan can be almost soul-shattering. A father-son team in Texas may handle 500 acres of rice or more, but barely make a good living by our standards. That many acres of rice in Japan supported one hundred families comfortably up until a couple of decades ago, and still does to some degree. And yet we insist that we are the efficient ones.
The Culture of Rice
Whether grown with Western machinery or Eastern backbone, rice is not the easiest grain to produce. It prefers a long growing season and warm humid weather. It is grown profitably in our country only in the Southwest, mostly in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and California. However, rice could probably be grown farther north, at least for home use. The Japanese have learned how to grow it successfully as far north as Hokkaido, which has a climate similar to our southern New England. Upland rice—varieties that grow without flood irrigation—will produce a crop in Thailand at 4,500 feet above sea level, and at twice that elevation in the Himalayas.
Upland rice does not yield as well as irrigated rice, though improved varieties show more promise. Upland rice is grown about like spring-planted wheat. Where level land or marshland is available for wet rice production, upland rice is usually discouraged.
Wet rice, or irrigated rice, can be direct-seeded in the paddy or field or started in a bed and transplanted. With direct hand-seeding, the number of hours to raise a crop can be reduced by about two-thirds. Much of the seeding in the United States is done by airplane.
The typical Asian farmer has been loath to switch to direct seeding despite the labor-saving advantages. He seems to prefer longer working hours to the higher cost of chemicals and machinery that would be necessary in place of labor. Agricultural experts seem to think his attitude is stupid. But the Asian farmer knows he is not going to gain a whole lot in net profits anyway by adapting new technology, and he runs the risk of becoming much more vulnerable to financial disaster when he substitutes cash and chemicals for labor. His American counterpart hasn’t learned that yet, but, oh my, the lesson is well underway. When technology offered the American farmer the bait, he swallowed. Technology said: “All you farmers are farming 500 acres and barely making it. I can make it possible for you to farm 1,000 acres and get rich.” The farmers accepted this as faith, not understanding that for every 500-acre farmer who went to 1,000 acres, some other farmer had to give up his 500 and go to work at something else. Now, when the 1,000acre farmers find they aren’t doing a whole lot better than when they farmed 500 acres, the technological answer is to farm 2,000 acres. And again, the farmers believe it.
Farming as Art
I suppose the Japanese farmer grumbles about the backbreaking aspect of his hand methods sometimes, but like true garden farmers the world over, he seems to like it, too. At least there is ample evidence that he derives satisfaction from it. He makes an art of his agriculture, as anyone who has seen well-tended, terraced rice paddies on a Japanese hillside can appreciate. It is art. Kusum Naizi, in The Lonely Furrow: Farming in the United States, Japan, and India (University of Michigan Press, 1969), pointed out that, while the Japanese farmer’s yard may be weedy, “never his fields. Yet he knows full well that those last blades of grass that he pulls out of his paddy so laboriously do not affect his production by an ounce. The transplanting of rice seedlings is done with similar excessive care. It is neat, precise, and meticulous, like an embroidery on silk.”
Agriculture for art’s sake is not limited to the Asian farmer. Ronald Blythe in his excellent portrait of English rural life, Akensfield (Penguin Press, 1969), emphasized the same propensity for art at the expense of economics among English farmers before industrialization. They too would row, hoe, cut, bind, and rank in precise patterns and spacings, so that fields took on the order and geometry of a formal garden.
The same sensitivity to art in agriculture marked the American farmer before industrialization. Farmsteads were built with an eye to beauty as well as utility. The farmstead scenes that find their way into picture frames today are all derived from an era before high technology engulfed farming. Today few farmers build art into their workaday world. They can’t afford to if they did want to. Old implements were always decorated with painted swirls, stencils, engravings. That took time, and now technology has decreed that time is a commodity to be priced, bought, and sold on the same callous basis that slaves were priced, bought, and sold. Technology has taken away the farmer’s time from him, and time is the most precious possession a man owns. So today the banks are built of marble and exhibit a taste for art; the barns, if built at all, are simply large, hideous collectors of manure from overcrowded animals.
My close neighbors, now gone, would have understood the Japanese farmer very well. They were of the old school of farming. I’ve told about Uncle Carl, who walked the rows of his soybean field, cutting weeds with his hoe. He spurned the herbicides he could have used because he knew they would not keep his fields nearly as clean as his hoe would. He cultivated with his tractor, too, but it would not get all the weeds either. Like the Japanese rice farmer, he was not satisfied until he removed all the weeds. His motives had nothing to do with profit, which a few weeds would not hurt. He did not have to make a profit anyhow. He had been a good and successful farmer all his life. He had all the money he desired. He hoed the weeds because he wanted his field to look beautiful. And to farmer eyes, his weedless field was art. In all this county full of herbicides and monstrous cultivators, only his field was without weeds. And farmers stopped along the road to admire it, and admire the work that made it so. He admired it too. He shared with “old-fashioned” farmers a wisdom the new technologists can’t comprehend. He had raised his daily work to the level of art, while the technologist slaved away all his days hoping to reserve a little time in the end for art purchased from an antiques store. Whose “economies of scale” were the wiser?
While the experts preach the advantages of direct seeding to him, the traditional Japanese farmer goes about making his nursery bed where he first “roughs out” the work of art that will also be his livelihood. He presses the seeds into the ground carefully. They must not be completely covered with soil, though he might cover them lightly with mulch. The bed is then flooded. When the primary leaves emerge, the bed is drained. Only very gradually, though, so the tender sprouts are not too quickly exposed to air and direct sunlight. More floodings and irrigations may follow, depending upon temperature, moisture, weeds, diseases, insects, the alternate irrigation and drainage serving to avoid too much of one problem while making sure there is enough of a countering solution. The process is scientific, but its application to the realities of this nursery bed, in this year—that is pure art. In about forty days, the young rice seedlings are transplanted into the paddy at precise spacings; close enough together for a maximum number of plants, but still allowing enough space for a man to walk while weeding. Again the field is flooded and drained alternately on a schedule based on the needs of that climate and that soil and that particular season. When ripe, the grain is cut by hand, the sheaves bound, dried, and then threshed using small hand- or motor-operated threshers. Output per man, by our standards, is extremely low, but efficiency in terms of number of people fed per unit of fossil energy used is extremely high. As F. H. King pointed out in his classic work, Farmers of Forty Centuries, in 1907 Chinese, Korean, and Japanese garden farms were feeding five hundred million people, almost twice the population of the United States today, on an area smaller than all the improved farmlands in the United States at that time. And doing it without any of today’s big machinery, commercial fertilizers, or herbicides.
Growing rice by the hundreds of acres, as in the United States, is a very different and expensive operation. Seed and chemicals are most often sprayed by plane now, followed by a light irrigation. Then, after the plants are about six to eight inches tall, standing water is kept in the fields until the crop begins to ripen. The very large fields laid out with levees on the contour are a marvelous feat of engineering, and a kind of art, too.
Scientists are now trying to cut down the use of some chemicals in commercial rice production, not only to cut expenses but also because the chemicals sometimes become nearly useless. For instance, because the fields stand in water for a good portion of the summer, rice land is a haven for mosquitoes. But bombarding them with insecticides has resulted in immune mosquitoes. Newer, more biological controls are now being tested, with some success. In Arkansas, mosquito fish stocked in rice fields at rates over one hundred fish per acre gave “very good to excellent control” after seventy-two hours. Insect-growth regulators also are showing promise in controlling the rice-field mosquito.
Weeds are difficult to control in rice fields without chemicals, but simplistic herbicide applications are no longer thought to be the solution. Researchers are working with a fungus that attacks northern jointvetch, a serious weed in rice. If successful, the venture would be a real breakthrough in biological weed control.
In the United States, three kinds of rice are grown: long, medium-, and short-grained rice. Long and medium are mostly Southern rices; short-grained rice is grown largely in California. As with any grain, many varieties exist of each type. If you want to try a small plot of rice as described at the end of this chapter, use a variety that’s recommended for your area. If none are, proceed at your own risk.
Rice from the field has a tight hull on it like oats and must be hulled. Rolling or abrasion easily removes the hull. Once hulled, rice is processed as brown rice, white rice, or parboiled rice. Humans historically have preferred refined white rice for eating, which is unfortunate, since white rice is the least nutritious of all. Brown rice is largely unrefined and therefore contains almost all the nutritious bran. White rice is polished rice, that is, the bran has all been abraded away. The supposedly “practical” reason the bran is taken out of rice (or wheat, or whatever) is that the bran has a high oil content, and, if milled into the flour, soon causes rancidity. In other words, milled brown rice won’t keep very long and should be milled only as needed. Parboiled rice is a kind of compromise between brown and white. The rice is cooked and dried before polishing away most of the bran. The cooking drives some nutrients, particularly B vitamins, on into the grain, thus preserving them in the flour even though the bran is removed.
White rice is about 90 to 94 percent starch and 6 to 10 percent protein. In removing the bran, 85 percent of the oil, 10 percent of the protein, 80 percent of the thiamine, 70 percent of the minerals and crude fiber, 50 percent of the riboflavin, and 65 percent of the niacin are lost, according to the USDA. A comparison of vitamin content of the three kinds of rice tells the story (see table 5).
Growing Rice Organically
Rice is being grown organically on a commercial basis, and profitably when demand for brown rice is good enough to support a high market price. During the early days of the brown rice boom around 1970, Wehah Farms in California turned over its large commercial rice operation to organic methods. As reported in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine in 1971, Wehah found that rice could be grown organically, though yields were less than those produced normally with chemicals. Instead of using pesticides to control tadpole shrimp, Wehah followed a carefully timed schedule of raising and lowering water levels in the fields to overcome, at least in part, the difficulties caused by this pest. Good sanitation and close attention to intervals between irrigations helped control seedling diseases, rice water weevil, and rice leaf miner. Crop rotation controlled weeds to some extent, and fish stocked in the fields kept the mosquitoes at bay. Instead of burning old rice straw, Wehah returned it to the soil. Chicken manure and green-manure crops were plowed into the soil for more fertility.
While few commercial rice growers would consider operating that way, the small homesteader and gardener can achieve success with rice using organic methods. Since I have no hands-on experience growing rice in northern Ohio, I was fortunate enough to find a remarkably detailed article by David Spiekerman and Junsei Yamazaki, in Organic Gardening and Farming from December 1975 (p. 64 ff.), giving an excellent step-by-step account that anyone in the proper climate should be able to follow successfully. Part of this account follows:
The technique we used to grow our rice is basically the method Japanese farmers have used for centuries. We used no chemicals, poisons, or machines to grow our rice. My partner, Junsei Yamazaki, grew up among rice paddies in Japan, and showed me traditional, organic, hand methods from start to finish. The whole effort was simple and smooth. Any healthy person can do it.
The plot of land we chose for our paddy had two assets. First, the soil had been under grass for countless years, and it was clean and naturally fertile. Second, the location was right next to our water well, so we conveniently used a short, rubber hose to pump the water into the paddy. However, the best water for irrigating rice is stream water because it contains more oxygen and minerals than well water.
Two disadvantages of this location did not appear to us until after we had planted. First, the paddy was situated on the north side of a row of large, leafy almond trees and therefore did not receive full sunlight until the afternoon. Secondly, we had no space to dig a small, warming basin for the cold well water. Ideally, the water entering the rice paddy should be warm to promote maximum growth and health of the rice plants. Our water emerged cold from the well and traveled a mere four feet to the paddy. Consequently, our rice grew slower than usual because we did not give it full sunlight nor warm water all day.
Our rice paddy was 10 × 18 feet. Because our ground was level, we shaped the paddy into a rectangle. On uneven, sloping ground, it is advisable to contour the shape of the paddy as the ground dictates. We created the paddy a few days before transplanting by an ingenious technique. First, we turned over the soil with a spade, working it loose and friable to a depth of one foot. The topsoil was a deep, clay loam in excellent health. Around the perimeter of the 10 × 18-foot plot, using a special spade with a long, narrow head, we dug a trench one-and-a-half feet deep and six inches wide. The soil dug out was placed along the tops of the four outer sides of the trench to form four dikes, each one foot high.
Next, taking sheets of black plastic, we placed them against the outer walls of the trenches and over the dikes. The plastic retarded seepage of water from the paddy into the bone-dry ground surrounding it. Then we leveled the soil between the trenches, which lowered the paddy bottom. We used a long, flat board and our eyes to level the paddy bottom. It was essential for the paddy bottom to be flat so that water would stand at an equal depth over the paddy. We tested our paddy by flooding it before planting. . . .
We used seed Yamazaki had brought from Japan years ago. Taking two pounds of seed, placing it in a bucket, adding cool water three-quarters of the way to the top of the bucket, and then adding a few tablespoons of unrefined sea salt, we swirled the seed, water, and salt around and around with our hands. When we stopped swirling, the viable, strong seeds sank to the bottom, while the weak seeds floated to the top. We removed the weak seeds by hand and swirled again, repeating the process until no more seeds floated on top of the water. Then we poured the strong seeds into a wire strainer and washed the seeds with cool water to clean away the salt. . . .
The day after selecting viable seed, March 28, we placed the seed in a small, cotton bag and tied it closed with string. Placing the bag full of seed in a bucket, we set a three-pound stone on top of the bag. Then we filled the bucket to the brim with water. Keeping a hose in the bucket, we ran just enough fresh water in the pail to keep a very slight dribble of water falling down the outside of the bucket. This amount of overflow was an indication that water was circulating through the bucket at a slow, gentle rate. We checked the overflow a few times daily. The seed spent 23 days soaking outdoors in the bucket. Rice can soak in water for up to 30 days this way. The water was cool and never warm. This long soaking starts the germinating process and indicates the unique strength of rice. Soaking also kills weak seed, which means that only strong seed will be planted in the ground.
On the 20th of April, we took the bag out and opened it. Each strong seed had a tiny, white sprout at one end. For one day, the seed lay in the bag on top of a stump out in the sunlight and air, which dried it slightly. The following day we planted the soaked seed, but not in the paddy; our technique required transplanting. So we prepared a small, seedling bed two feet by four feet in a sunny, warm spot of soil. The bed was slightly raised above the surrounding ground, which made it easier for us to remove the young rice plants for transplanting. Adding rich leaf compost, sand, and water to the bed, we planted the sprouted seeds by broadcasting them over the ground. The seeding density was thick enough to cover the ground almost completely.
Next we covered the seed lightly with sand. It is important not to cover the seeds with too much sand, which can cake and crust, making it difficult for the sprouts to break through to sunlight. On top of the entire bed, we laid a thin layer of rice straw and tied string across the straw lengthwise to prevent the wind from blowing the seeds and straw away.
It may be necessary to screen the bed from birds that like to eat the tender rice sprouts.
Every two days, we watered the seedlings by hand. Sometimes it rained, but rain is not common or dependable in late April and May in Chico. One week after planting the seeds, tiny green shoots appeared. We weeded every day to allow the rice maximum opportunity to utilize the soil nutrients. A seedling bed is a very fertile, concentrated plot of soil. The quality of the rice harvested is influenced by the soil condition of the seedling bed. Our young rice plants grew for 35 days in this bed to a height of four to five inches. About 40 days is ideal for developing strong rice plants suitable for transplanting.
On May 26th on a hot afternoon, we transplanted into our rice paddy. Wetting the soil to a muddy condition, we removed the seedlings from their bed by hand, being careful not to damage their roots. We carried them over to the paddy. There we had marked off 14 rows lengthwise, eight inches apart. Planting the seedlings in rows allowed us room to walk and to hand-weed during the growing season. Planting by airplane or by broadcasting provides no open space to walk and weed. Commercial rice growers must resort to poisonous weedicides sprayed by airplane. Rice paddies attract a wide variety of weeds, which grow faster than rice. It is best to pull the weeds out of the soil and then plunge the top of the weed plant back into the mud where it will decompose and feed the rice.
Three of us bent over with a handful of seedlings and firmly pushed them into the mud, two or three plants in clumps six inches apart down each row. It took us 20 minutes to complete the transplanting. It would take two healthy people one day to transplant an acre of rice. For the first 20 days after transplanting, we kept water at a depth of one inch in the paddy all day long. Our pump steadily fed water into the paddy at a slow rate. We turned the water off at night, and the water in the paddy seeped slowly into the depths of the soil. After one hour, no water would be standing in the paddy. Freeing the soil of water during the night allowed more oxygen to enter the root zones of the rice plants. Incidentally, no mosquitoes could breed in the paddy without a continuous, standing body of water. In the morning, it took roughly one hour to fill the empty paddy to a one-inch depth with the pump turned on fully.
The seedlings took one week to establish their roots in the wet mud and to stand straight. Occasionally, a seedling would lose its hold and float on the water but would not die. We simply picked it up and pushed it down in the mud again. The commercial rice growers flood their paddies to depths of six inches or more. Our technique flooded the paddy to a depth of no more than one inch of water. The slow circulation of oxygen-rich water to the roots of the rice plant is the essential point to irrigating rice. Maintaining a depth of one inch of water allows this to happen.
After 20 days passed, we watered only in the morning because we wanted the warm, afternoon sun to hit the soil directly around each rice plant. The sun’s rays stimulated new rice shoots to grow from the base of each plant. The fecundity of this seed was amazing to watch. Each plant was capable of producing 12 new stalks in a season, all capable of bearing heads under optimum conditions.
From the middle of June to the 1st of August, the rice plants grew nearly two feet in height. New shoots continued to appear. During this time, a Great Dane chewed about one foot off the tops of 30 plants on his stroll through the paddy. The injured rice was strong enough to recover the lost growth in a week and assume the same height as the rest of the rice. Frogs were living and playing in the paddy at night. Grasshoppers, dragonflies, butterflies, and other small insects frolicked among the deep green leaves. Our cats slept in the cool, wet paddy during the hot afternoons. Once a gopher dug a hole in the paddy, and the water leaked out. We placed two mothballs down the hole and filled it with soil. The gopher never bothered us again.
Only twice in the five months the rice was in the ground did we weed. (Commercial growers use a formidable arsenal of chemical poisons to eliminate weeds and pests; next to cotton, rice receives the heaviest dose of chemicals in American agriculture.) Our experience never suggested such a need. The paddy was a thriving ecosystem. Our role as farmers consisted primarily of regulating the water. The paddy took care of itself.
During the first week of August, plants at the sunnier, north end of the paddy began to head. Keeping the paddy covered all day with one inch of water is critical during the heading stage. Excessive rain and wind, which we did not have at that time, can retard the flowering and self-pollination of rice. The heading moved from the north end to the south slowly because of the shade of the almond trees. All the plants headed by the second week of September. Some plants were barren, others were part fertile, part barren. Seeds which appeared white were either insect damaged or barren. These may have been five percent of the total seed production.
The rice started to yellow by mid-September, and the heavy, maturing heads bent downward. One week later on September 21st, we stopped flooding the paddy. We permitted the rice to dry for a month in the paddy, two weeks longer than the necessary two weeks. On October 19th, we eagerly harvested the golden grain. Cutting with sickles and bundling it by hand took us one hour. Then we threshed the rice for another hour.
Threshing was easy. We built a wooden frame two feet tall with a metal grate on top. Beating a bundle of rice against the grate a dozen times released the seed from the stalk. Placing the seed on a plastic sheet, we cleaned it by throwing it up in the windy air. For one week, we dried the rice in the sun.
Milling the rice to eat is a real chore. The husk adheres firmly to the grain and offers excellent protection for it. The commercial mills crack about 20 percent of the grain in the husking process. A hand machine sold in Japan is available to the small rice farmer. The most primitive method of removing the husk is to place the grain in a stump with a depression carved out of it and then hammer the rice with a wooden mallet. The force of hitting rubs the grain against the stump and scratches and loosens the husk. This breaks a lot of the grain and does require you to separate the grain from the husk with a fan or with the wind. It is best to mill the rice in small quantities as it stores well in its husk and removing the husk begins the slow process of nutrient loss. . . .
Our yield was 30 pounds of paddy rice. We planted approximately 1,550 seedlings in the paddy, which amounted to three ounces of seed rice. Our paddy was roughly 1/215 of an acre, so to get an idea of how much rice one acre will produce using our method, multiply 30 times 215. The yield would be 6,450 pounds per acre from 40 pounds of seed. The commercial, organic rice growers get a yield of 2,500 pounds per acre. Chemical growers of rice get 5,000 pounds per acre but must plant 100 to 200 pounds of seed per acre. The rice straw we cut from the paddy has multiple uses. It is a valuable feedstuff for livestock. It makes excellent mulch. It can be woven into matting. In comparison with other growers, we did well. But our true pleasure was assisting the growth of a truly remarkable plant. The enjoyment we got watching our rice grow cannot be measured.
Never having tried to grow rice myself in Ohio, I feel a little uneasy talking about it. I wanted to give a very detailed account of it in this book, though, as much to satisfy the reader’s curiosity as anything, but I bet that not many garden farmers have either the will or the time to grow rice in the meticulous manner described above. Too tedious. I doubt that one would have to attend to such minute details and would find shortcuts that would make growing rice much more straightforward. I also have a hunch that growing upland rice is easier still.
In recent years there has developed, at least in California, another source of revenue from rice. The straw, baled, is in demand for building/construction uses. Also, if progress continues to be made in turning plant fibers into fuel, there should be more demand for straw of all kinds to make ethanol or, more likely, biobutanol, which appears to be a more efficient fuel to process from grain straw.
Rice Recipes
Below are a few recipes. Your own favorite cookbooks will have many more.
6 cups chicken stock
½ cup raw, brown rice
Salt to taste
1 whole egg
2 egg yolks
¼ cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons parsley, freshly snipped
teaspoon ground cayenne
Freshly chopped dill to garnish
• Put chicken broth into a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil. Add rice to soup, season with salt, and cook until rice is tender, 15 to 20 minutes.
• Put whole egg and two egg yolks into a medium-sized bowl; beat with a rotary beater or wire whisk until light and frothy. Slowly add the lemon juice, beating together thoroughly.
• Just before serving: dilute the egg-lemon mixture with 1 cup hot broth, beating constantly with a wire whisk until well blended. Gradually add the diluted mixture to the remaining hot soup, stirring constantly. Bring almost to the boiling point, but do not boil or the soup will curdle. Stir in the parsley and cayenne; adjust seasoning.
• Remove from the heat and serve immediately, garnished with freshly chopped dill.
Yield: approximately 6 cups
Cheese Quiche in Brown Rice Shell
1½ cups cooked brown rice
3 eggs
¼ cup nonfat dry milk
1 cup water
¼ teaspoon salt
Dash of freshly ground black pepper
Dash of ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon whole wheat flour
1¼ cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese (or part natural Swiss and part cheddar)
• Preheat oven to 375°F.
• Press cooked rice into an oiled, 9-inch pie plate. Bake in oven just until dry (about 5 minutes); cool.
• Using a medium-sized bowl, beat the eggs until light and fluffy. Combine nonfat dry milk and water with a wire whisk and add to eggs, along with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
• Add whole wheat flour to shredded cheese; toss lightly but thoroughly. Put into cooled rice shell, spreading to edges of crust. Pour egg-milk mixture over all. Place in oven and bake 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 325°F and continue to bake 25 to 30 minutes longer, or until filling puffs up and is golden brown.
• Remove from oven; allow to set for about 5 minutes; cut in wedges and serve.
Yield: 6 servings
Sprouted Lentils, Bean, and Rice Salad
½ pound pinto beans or kidney beans
1 pound fresh green beans, cooked
2 cups cooked brown rice
1 cup diced celery
½ green pepper, diced
¼ cup chopped pimento
¼ cup sprouted lentils
½ cup oil
½ cup wine vinegar
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 medium-sized red onion for garnish, sliced thin
• Soak pinto or kidney beans overnight in water to cover. Do not drain. Using soaking water, cook the beans until just tender. Don’t overcook. Drain, reserving the cooking liquid for soup.
• Combine green beans and pinto or kidney beans, rice, celery, green pepper, pimento, and lentil sprouts.
• Combine oil, vinegar, honey, and seasonings. Toss salad in dressing with the onion rings.
Yield: 10 servings
½ cup soy flour
2 cups brown rice flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup nonfat dry milk
1 cup oil
10 tablespoons honey
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1½ cups ground or finely chopped Brazil nuts
• Preheat oven to 400º F.
• Sift flours, salt, and nonfat dry milk together.
• In a large mixing bowl, combine oil, honey, slightly beaten eggs, and vanilla extract. Using an electric beater set at medium speed, beat mixture until ingredients are thoroughly blended.
• Gradually beat in sifted flours and nonfat dry milk. Stir in Brazil nuts. Refrigerate dough for 1 to 2 hours.
• Take rounded teaspoonfuls of cookie dough and roll into 1-inch balls. Place 2 inches apart on an oiled cookie sheet; flatten with a glass. Bake in oven for 8 to 10 minutes or until golden brown around the edges. Remove from oven and place cookies on a wire rack to cool.
Yield: about 5 dozen