photo Stuff 1

I’m getting ready to do a pretty big batch of Chop this coming weekend. So I have to do a little shopping.

I discovered a little store a couple of miles away from me called the World Market. One day a few months a go I decided to investigate and I’m so happy I did! It’s sort of an Eastern European food market and even though I’m a “Foodie,” I don’t know what half the stuff that’s in there. As I am always on the hunt for nutritious food for my Chop, I was happy to discover some stuff they don’t have at the  local big grocery stores. They sell buckwheat for instance. And buckwheat rocks nutritionally. It contains all 8 essential amino acids, and it contains a high-quality protein. Google it; you’ll be surprised.

What I have in this photo clockwise from the top left is Barley, (regular barley, not “pearled barley) real bulgur, not the pasta, oat groats, buckwheat flakes, oatmeal and regular buckwheat. I’ll cook the barley and the buckwheat, but the rest is going in as is. The buckwheat flakes appear to be like oatmeal, only it’s made of buckwheat instead of oats. I thought that was kind of cool.

Let me explain something about barley. Barley is a tough little grain and it has to have the husk removed before it can be eaten. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but when you have “pearled barley,” they also polish it to remove the bran layer. This removes a lot of the nutrition. This is not unlike the difference between brown rice and white rice. White rice is also polished to remove the nutritious brown outer layer. I also have other ingredients I’m using, of course, but those are some pretty neat little items. I’m also adding this:

photo-2

 

The wild rice mix is a no-brainer, but I also have unsweetened dried or desiccated coconut as it’s sometimes called, raw hemp hearts, chia seed, and in the upper right hand corner is quinoa flakes. The rice gets cooked and the rest of it goes in as is.

As always, I’ll be undercooking the rice, pastas, and other cooked ingredients so they can more easily absorb some of the moisture from the vegetables. I’ll also be coating the pastas and other grains with coconut oil to help keep the grains and other cooked items from sticking together as well as adding another layer of nutrition. I’ve used flax seed oil as well as hemp seed oil in the past.  I’ll be busy this weekend doing my hunter-gatherer thing. I’m hoping to put some very nice standards into my Chop as well as maybe some more exotic items. We’ll see what I end up with.