Days 16 - 17: Kitchen Store Cupboard Challenge Has Now Formally Entered its Dried Bean and Pulses Phase.....
Buoyed by the success of The Lentil Experiment, i felt confident enough to step it up a notch and finally tackle the mountains of other dried legumes that have been loitering in the very depths of my kitchen cupboards for years.  The star of today's culinary endeavor was to be the humble mung bean.  Its been so long i don't remember my thought processes, but at some point in the way distant past, I think i must have been preparing for zombie armageddon or some other apocalyptic event because i bought pounds and pounds of the stuff!  I think maybe i had vague notions of sprouting them but soon realized that that would require constant care and attention (watering! rinsing! turning! draining! all too draining!) so that idea went out the window.

Anyway, so here we are and its time to tackle the Mung Bean Mountain.  Knowing the answer would lie within, i faithfully consulted Gillian McKeith's You are What You Eat cookbook and, Bob's your uncle, there it was - Gillian's famous Mung Bean Casserole.  The blurb described it as "the best dish for ridding the body of toxins and bacteria" - crikey. Hopefully it won't rid me of ALL my bacteria - that would probably result in a very long trip to the loo.   Perhaps Gillian is just taking a bit of creative license to whip up some enthusiasm for her favorite recipe.  It was all pretty straight forward, if a bit labor-intensive but in the end I think it turned out pretty well.  Paired with some brown rice, it certainly checked all the boxes in terms of complete nutrition, even if it didn't send my taste buds into paroxysms of ecstasy.  Here are the scores on the (glass mason jar) doors:

Days 16 - 17: Mung bean medley madness

Ingredients: dried mung beans, beef stock (no veggie stock), turmeric, cumin, coriander, onion, carrots, endives, radishes, clover sprouts, brown rice.

DoD = 3 (pre-soaking! cooking not just one but two - two! - dried ingredients!  artistic arranging and layering!)

II = 3 (i think anything that voluntarily includes the use of mung beans deserves credit for imagination)

PfBF = 2 (it tasted very brown - not bad, but the culinary equivalent of Birkenstocks)

Overall assessment: it wasn't bad but it wasn't a patch on the Lentil Burger lusciousness of the last couple of days.  It was so ridiculously healthful, it almost generated a new Assessment Index, the How Healthy? score (1= no nutritional value whatsoever (CheezWhiz or Big Mac) to 5 = so damned virtuous, a free halo is included with every serving).