How to Grow Lettuce in a Bottle

Lettuce is pretty easy to grow. It's forgiving. It wants you to succeed in growing it and ultimately killing it. It's basically masochistic.

Lettuce also needs very little soil to grow, which makes it an optimal container plant. Unlike tomatoes, which need lots of soil, lettuce can probably survive in softball-sized amount of soil.

So making tiny greenhouses for your lettuce is very easy. You could do it with an empty water bottle.

Simply take the a bottle (this is a Dasani bottle), remove the wrapper. Using a box-cutter, slice the bottle right below where the neck begins to curve. Fill the bottle about half-way with moist potter's soil (you can buy a small bag of it about $5).

How to grow lettuce in an upcycled water bottle. #greengreen pic.twitter.com/QnJDs9d8Ur

— Holly Wood (@girlziplocked) April 30, 2015

Plant three tiny little lettuce seeds by just placing them on top of the soil and pressing down with your finger. Lettuce doesn't really need to be "buried." Then place the top of the bottle back on, leaving the cap off. Use a spray bottle to keep the soil moist and place in a window or anywhere there is sunlight. The bottle will protect your baby lettuce from getting eaten by critters, so you can be more daring with where you put these. Once they start growing full size, it's fairly easy to pull the rootball out and replant it, if you want. You can also harvest baby lettuce straight from the bottle.

This lettuce shown here is baby black seeded simpson. Each packet of seeds (about $1-2) could probably cover at least 20 bottles if you got ambitious.

Grow Your Own Pea Shoots Stupid Easy

Pea shoots are a fancy, rich-person green. You can find them adorning canapes, which are French for bougie-shit-on-crackers. They cost like a million dollars.

la-deee-daaaa

You can also, you know, eat them like a human being and reap the insane nutritional benefits that come from eating sprouted seeds and beans.

For less than a dollar, you can grow pea shoots in practically any container that will hold 2" of moist dirt.

One bag of green peas (98 cents) planted in whatever refuse you have will grow super healthy pea shoots. #greengreen pic.twitter.com/z80Id0lnLW
— Holly Wood (@girlziplocked) April 15, 2015

So, basically, you need to buy a bag of WHOLE (not split, dumbass) green peas. These are found wherever they sell dried beans.

Then, you soak them for about 24 hours. You could go ahead an soak the whole bag, but each pea will produce one shoot (duh) and you'll be hard pressed for containers if you go this route. Try a quarter of the bag first.

Then fill your containers with dirt. Practically any crappy dirt will work. Seriously. I tried this with clay-laden dirt from my backyard and they still grow pretty well. But for your purposes, I mean, seriously, you could just go steal some dirt. Dirt is free. Go find some.

Ok, then you basically just toss your soaked peas over the dirt and sprinkle a little dirt on top. That's it. Donzo. Keep it moistened and in a relatively sunny spot (windowsills work fine). They're idiot proof.

Here's what they'll look like after four weeks:

Pea shoot harvest day! Imma gonna eat youuus. #greengreen pic.twitter.com/BQlkEjkxYV
— Holly Wood (@girlziplocked) April 15, 2015

Weekly pea update pic.twitter.com/6IMFCj2BQU
— Holly Wood (@girlziplocked) April 9, 2015

You can repeat the process repeatedly all year long. These things are really good for you. You can eat them in a salad or prepare them pretty much any way you might prepare spinach. You eat the entire thing, so grab a pair of scissors and snip when they reach around 4" tall.

Sneaky Sqoodles

So the other day, I showed you how to make Zoodles. Today, I'm going to make Sqoodles, which are julienned squashes. Then, I'm going to sneak them into leftover protein-enhanced pasta that'll I'll use for a stir-fry. Here's my thinking: Sneaky sqoodles get eaten. Plain squashes do not.

First, shred your squash like so. Our squashes are weird and look like cupcakes. Obviously, the straighter and less cupcake-y your squash, the easier this is.

Sqoodle pile!

Mix into pasta and tell no one.

Zoodles

What do to with zucchini? Zoodles! Shred your bounty of zucchini into little noodles using a julienne peeler.

Transfer to a skillet and stirfry with a little olive or coconut oil.

Transfer once more to a strainer and squeeze out any excessive moisture.

Voila.

Sriracha Kale Chips

After I popped a batch of these into the dehydrator, I climbed onto the roof to watch the meteor shower. I came down about two hours later to find they had been scavenged from the racks.

Sriracha is magic.

Ok, we generously received the bounty of a neighbor's kale harvest. And nature is beautiful and photosynthesis is great and yadada, I smothered the leaves in sriracha and dehydrated it. Yeah, that's it. Rip the stems off, smother in sriracha, and place on the racks.

Desiccate for two hours. Done.

Holly's Secret Almond Milk Red Curry

Curry is delicious. But as traditionally prepared with coconut milk, it's super fatty. How can you get all the tastiness of curry without the fat? You wanna know the first secret of this post? Do you? 

Unsweetened almond milk. 

At about 40 calories a cup, 3 cups of almond milk weighs in at 120 calories and 9 grams of fat compared to the 63 grams of fat contained in a can of coconut milk. And, actually, compared to coconut milk, ounce for ounce, it's a lot cheaper.

So that's the first secret. 

The second secret has less to do with secret ingredients than my secret for preparing a ridiculous amount of vegetables that can be thrown quickly into the prepared curry. It's not really a secret so much as no one ever seems to fully realize the potential of stackable bamboo steamers. These things are golden for those of you who need to prepare lots of vegetables for lunches over the week. Works like a dream on frozen or fresh, so get out those bags of frozen broccoli. Cut up that sweet potato. Whatever you got? Steam it. Let's go, bitches. Let's do this.

Almond Milk Red Curry

3 Cups of Unsweetened Almond Milk

1/2 Cup water

3 tbs. Red Curry Paste

1 tbs. brown sugar

1/2 tsp. Cumin (optional)

1/4 tsp. Coriander (optional)

Sriracha sauce (Do what your body tells you to do with this one)

Bring the milk and the water to a boil. Stir in the curry paste, sugar and the spices until blended smooth. Simmer to reduce to a thickness you prefer. 

MEANWHILE, THE VEGGIES.

My suggested veggie combo here is wilted spinach (one lb. package), sweet potato (2 small), carrot (about 5) and tofu cubes (one package).  Wilting spinach is stupid easy so I'm going to not going to waste your sweet-ass time describing it here. But to use the bamboo steamers, simply chop up the sweet potatoes and carrots into chunks and arrange in your steamer shelves. Place baskets over boiling water (a wok or stockpot work equally well) until the veggies are tender. How do you tell if they're tender? Stick a fork in a veggie. It should be soft. That's what tender means. 

Veggies ready? Ok, dump all that crap into the curry and mix it up. It's going to make an insane amount. Probably at least 3 or 4 normal human servings. I don't know how to tell you what normal people eat. 

I threw some leftover cooked quinoa in here, too. It's a good recipe for throwing crap like that in. I hear normal people eat curry over rice. You could try that. I like eating curry over more curry though.