White Rice

As part of our experiment this year, we're researching a lot of our food. We had always known that brown rice was much more nutritious than white, but hadn't thought much about WHY. White rice has had its husk, bran, and germ removed, which means it won't spoil as fast but it ALSO means that there's pretty much no nutrition left in white rice. So, like everything else, it is processed to try to add some of the vitamins back in. Has anyone else noticed how much effort the food industry spends adding nutrients back in to our food after stripping it of all nutritional value?

So, we've really tried to switch exclusively to brown rice, which takes much longer to cook. That works fine, though we're still getting it pretty mushy. I had used pearl barley in casseroles a few times, until I discovered that the "pearl" part translates into "having all the nutrition stripped as well." I have not yet been able to locate "unpearled" barley, so we decided to keep looking. And finally--we think we have the answer!

Hard red wheat.

Which, as you might have guessed, is above all else, hard. The good part is, it preserves a nice texture once cooked. The bad part is, it either needs to be soaked overnight before cooking, or boiled for an hour. We're going to try making some large batches & freezing it or dehydrating it to see if we can speed things up a bit. I realize we could just try to think ahead the night before, but that hasn't worked really well for beans, so I don't imagine I'll do better with wheat. Chocolate cake--THAT I might remember.....