Because it was there....

Every once in awhile I get a crazy notion about doing something from beginning to end. You know, like in the olden days when men were men and women were really tired all the time because there was no "Diego" to turn on during dinner prep, and laundry took all day and was a full body work out with the great possibility of third degree burns. I got one of these notions a couple of weeks ago when I realized that some of the straw that we'd used to mulch our garlic crop last fall, had sprouted and that along with all the tasty tasty garlic there was a fair quantity of wheat popping up. "Hmm..." I thought to myself. "Hmmm....I wonder how much wheat you need to make a loaf of bread?"More than I managed to gather, that's for sure. I understood the basic mechanics of threshing, you lightly crush the seed head to release the "chaff" and then you shake it to bring all the loose stuff up to the top and the seeds fall to the bottom. I vaguely remembered something called a "winnowing" basket from anthropology class, which was basically a big flat loosely woven basket that you would shake around so that all the wheat could fall out. Since I wasn't processing a lot of wheat I figured I could make do with whatever I had in my kitchen...in retrospect, it's probably easier to process A LOT of wheat, and the small amount that I was dealing with would be considered the waste.
Pretty huh? Just like on the beer bottle labels?
And yeah, it worked pretty much like that...I used the "rubbing it between your hands" method for releasing the wheat berries , and the "blowing on it lightly over a kitchen sink" method for "separating the wheat from the chaff" (an adage which I now feel uniquely qualified to over use). If you have about three hours of time to devote to the production of a small quantity of wheat berries, and you are resigned to the fact that your final product will have a fair amount of straw left in it, then yeah, I'd say it worked pretty well. Towards the end I got a bit more efficient with my technology, using a flat plate, a round bottomed bowl and kitchen strainer with widish holes, for successive winnowing.
And here's what I have. An eight ounce jelly jar full of wheat. Wheat like I can go and buy by the scoopful out of the bulk bins at the co-op...whoo hoo! My best option for grinding it is probably our little coffee grinder, so I guess it's a good thing that I don't have much. What to do with this precious stuff?

This is how my great notions usually end. "Well...as romantic as it is to think of times gone by, I'm sure happy I live in the 21st century, and not the 18th. Isn't it lovely that spinning wool can be a hobby, and that if I don't feel like knitting I don't have to worry about my family having cold feet in the winter?" Sometimes you just have to do something to find out why it's better to let other people do it for you...people with big machines.

Ragnar...21st century girl.