lupin rejuvelac

Rejuvelac is a lightly fermented beverage with two ingredients: sprouted seeds (usually grains), and water. Making rejuvelac is really easy. All you do is soak the seeds over night, sprout them for 1 or two days, put them at the bottom of a pitcher, fill the pitcher with water, and let the pitcher sit on the counter for 2-3 days. If done well, it has a mild, refreshing, taste, which I can best compare to diluted lemon juice with a pinch of salt (this is a pretty crude approximation of the taste though, if you want to know how it tastes, I recommend making some yourself). It has a unique, but not unpleasant smell. The flavor seems to vary depending on the kind of seed used. It may also vary depending on the water used, but all I've ever used was local tap water, so I don't know.

Grains are by far the most common seeds to use as substrate. I've made it with spelt berries, and barley (the unhulled kind with a thick hull still on it). The spelt rejuvelac turned out better for me than the barley rejuvelac. The original version uses wheat berries. Sprout people recommend rye. But I've also seen references to people using legumes such as lentil or mung. So in the spirit of Dennis Moore, I figured, why not try lupins, and it wound up working ok. I use tap water exclusively because it's convenient, but other recipes I've seen, including the original, recommend using "purified water".

Lupin Rejuvelac

• Soak 1/3 cup of dry lupin seeds for 24 hour
• Drain off water and pick out unswelled seeds (if you soak these longer, they will actually swell eventually but in the interest of time, just take them out)
• Let remaining seeds sprout for 24-48 hours, rinsing and draining every 12 hours or so (I sprouted for 36 hours, but I think that whenever the tails are at least as long as the bean, you should be ok) (the original recipe also specifically says not to rinse, so you can probably get away with skipping that step and it may give you a stronger brew)
• Take out any seeds that didn't sprout
• Cover sprouts with 2 quarts of water
• let sit at room temperature for 4 days (I swirl it around about once a day, but that might not be necessary), or until the rejuvelac is as strong as you prefer.

I drain the finished rejuvelac off into another pitcher, then I refill the first pitcher and make another batch. After the second batch, I cook up the sprouts (which probably causes Ann Wigmore some postmortem restlessness, for which I apologize) and eat them with rice or quinoa.

Conclusion: Lupin actually makes decent rejuvelac, nevertheless, I drink it with a squirt of lemon. It's not as good as spelt rejuvelac, but better than barley rejuvelac. I'm sure the process could be optimized to make a better brew: for example by increasing the amount of sprouts, the sprouting time, or the rejuvelac incubation time. For the purposes of a dinner to be served to guests, I would be hesitant to include this on the menu, at least the current version of this, because it has a taste and smell that I think are too unfamiliar to most people. For myself, I may make it from time to time because it's an interesting flavor and I can cook up and eat the beans afterwards, so it's not as though it is a waste of good lupins.

Lupin hummus

I have found that sweet lupin makes a fine substrate for hummus. The point of this post isn't to present an optimal hummus recipe, but merely to show that lupin can be used instead of chick pea, and the hummus will still be pretty good.

I made one batch of raw sprouted hummus, and one batch of cooked hummus.

Raw sprouted lupin hummus:
Soak seeds over night.
Remove unswelled seeds (I'll post later on how to deal with these)
Sprout the swelled seeds for 36 hours (put them in a bowl with a lid set lightly on top, rinse and drain every 12 hours).

Put in blender:
3/4 cup sprouts
2 tsp olive oil (or any other kind of vegetable oil)
1 clove of garlic
1 tsp fresh diced chives
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
pinch of salt

Blend, enjoy

Cooked lupin hummus:
Soak seeds over night.
Remove unswelled seedsboil swelled seeds for 2 hours (after 2 hours, they were still kind of tough, but it didn't seem to matter)

Put in blender:
3/4 cup sprouts
2 tsp olive oil (or any other kind of vegetable oil)
1 clove of garlic
1 tsp fresh diced chives
1/2 tsp of salt

Blend, enjoy

You'll notice that I put lemon juice in the raw hummus, and additional salt in the cooked hummus, but there's no reason you couldn't make a saltier raw hummus or a lemony cooked hummus. I was just experimenting (and you should too!). Both recipes worked. The cooked hummus is a bit richer, and the raw hummus is a bit fresher, which are the effects I was going for.

My hummus ended up being pretty coarse, and a little chewy. I think this could be solved by more thorough blending, possibly in the presence of additional oil. I was using a fairly inexpensive blender, and not filling the chamber all the way, so it didn't blend very well.

An issue with lupins is that they have a tougher hull than most other edible beans, and there isn't an easy way to remove the hull, so if you don't thoroughly cream the hummus, the hull fragments will contribute to a texture that is a bit unusual for hummus (although I personally don't find it unpleasant).

Sprouted lupins, ready to blend













Raw on the left, cooked on the right. The raw is a bit lighter color, but other than that, they looked the same to me.

Ten Pounds of Lupins

So... I bought 10 lbs. of Australian Sweet Lupins from Lupina LLC. I intended to only buy 5 or 6 lbs, but they offer free shipping on orders more than about $40. Each pound of lupin is $4, and shipping was otherwise going to be $12, so by buying enough for free shipping I ended up with 3 lbs of free lupins (right?!). My 10 lbs was divided among 7 lbs of seeds, and 3 lbs of flour.
When I opened the box, there was flour everywhere (maybe 1/2 teaspoon total but well spread out so it looked like a lot), but none of the bags seemed obviously damaged. I immediately cut the flour bags open and dumped them into a big plastic container.

printing print-locked pdfs

software needed: ghost script, ghost view, foxit reader (or any other pdf reader, the print options in foxit seem to play better with my printer for doing things like printing multiple pages to one sheet).

open pdf with ghost view (GSview).
File->convert->device:pdfwrite->ok (default options seem to work fine)

open the generated file with foxit.
print the file

There are lots of other ways to do this also...

Betel leaf tea: like drinking a dental office

I had the opportunity to eat some betel leafs today. My first impression was that it was like chewing on a spicy local anesthetic with a hint of black licorice. Which turns out to be pretty close to the truth. Betel is related to the plant that is the source of black pepper (hence the spiciness?), its oil contains eugenol (which is the major component of clove oil, is used as a local oral anesthetic, and is the source of the typical smell of dentists offices), and its oil contains anethole, one of the components of licorice root extract.

The initial chewing not being wholly unpleasant, I decided to make tea out of the betel leaf. The tea was much less strong than the leaf itself. I think from dilution and because the oil in betel leafs is held in glands in the middle of the leaf and the leaf is pretty tough and waxy, so the oil probably doesn't extract very well. The tea wasn't spicy at all, and had a much less powerful anesthetic effect. Drinking the tea gave an overall sensory experience similar to what I imagine one would experience if eating licorice in a dental office.

In 1999, there was actually a study published about how people associate the smell of eugenol with either positive or negative emotions depending on their attitude towards dental offices. Personally, I'm pretty indifferent towards dental offices, although I generally don't associate them with food, which is probably why I thought the betel leaf taste was pretty odd for a food. Also, I tend to prefer that my food not make my tongue go numb. However, given the huge popularity of betel leaf consumption in certain parts of Asia, I guess this is a cultural phenomenon. I wonder if people who spend more time chewing betel leafs than sitting in dental offices associate dental offices with betel leafs, and start getting cravings when they're having their teeth looked at.

Checking md5 sums for lots of files from Windows

I run a lot of local BLAST searches on Windows machines. When you download a blast database from NCBI, you should also download the md5 file so you can check that the downloaded file is exactly the same as the one on the server (sometimes there can be fidelity issues when transferring data). Linux has a handy tool for comparing md5 sums, called md5sum. Example.

Finding a minimal set of English vocabulary with WordNet, Perl, and GLPK integer programming

Preface:
This was my semester project for the class "Principles of Optimization" which was one of my absolute favorite classes that I took in college. It uses WordNet, which is a fantastic database for looking at relationships between English words, (it seems to be the basis of many online tools such as the Visual Thesuarus that is constantly advertised on dictionary.com, it was fun to see how the graphs I made for this project exactly matched the content of Visual Thesuarus, a website that seems to be just begging for an open-source ripoff...). To access WordNet, I used the Perl library WordNet::QueryData which seemed to work quite well. For the Integer Programming, I had a much harder time, I used the library Math::GLPK which has bugs that confused me for quite a while (I wish I remembered what they were, but I don't, all I remember is a general feeling of frustration with the library), if I were to redo this project, I'd take a different approach, maybe writing lp text files and solving with the glpk command line interface, or maybe using Python to interface with an IP solver. I used Cytoscape to generate the network graphs.

For those just here for example code for WordNet::QueryData, or Math::GLPK,
you can find it in a the perl file that you can download here. All others, Read On!