#broccolisprouts

Ferment Your First Jar in 5 Steps

Body copy: Because humans did this for 4,000 years before Whole Foods charged you $12 for it.

One cabbage. Two tablespoons of salt. Your hands. A mason jar. That's the whole ingredient list. No starter kit. No subscription box. No influencer code.

This is sauerkraut — the way your great-grandmother made it, and her great-grandmother before her. Osmosis does the work. You just chop, salt, squeeze, pack, and wait.

Full food science breakdown, history, and troubleshooting: Be Pro-Veggional: A Fermentation Guide 

For a quick lunch or dinner, these Chicken and Chickpea Salad Pita Sandwiches with Broccoli Sprouts are a healthy and tasty choice. When you mix grilled chicken, chickpeas, and fresh vegetables with a creamy yogurt dressing, you get a filling and healthy meal. Adding broccoli sprouts to this tasty sandwich gives it a nice crunch and extra nutrients.

Ingredients: 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, grilled and sliced. 1 cup canned chickpeas, drained and rinsed. 1 cup broccoli sprouts. 1/2 cup diced cucumber. 1/2 cup diced tomatoes. 1/4 cup diced red onion. 1/4 cup diced red bell pepper. 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley. 4 whole wheat pita pockets. 1/2 cup plain yogurt. 2 tablespoons lemon juice. 1 clove garlic, minced. 1 teaspoon ground cumin. Salt and pepper to taste.

Instructions: In a large bowl, combine the grilled and sliced chicken, chickpeas, cucumber, tomatoes, red onion, red bell pepper, and fresh parsley. In a separate small bowl, mix together the plain yogurt, lemon juice, minced garlic, ground cumin, salt, and pepper to create the yogurt dressing. Pour the yogurt dressing over the chicken and chickpea salad mixture, and toss to coat everything evenly. Cut each whole wheat pita pocket in half and warm them up if desired. Stuff each pita half with a generous portion of the chicken and chickpea salad. Top each pita sandwich with a handful of broccoli sprouts. Serve immediately and enjoy your delicious Chicken and Chickpea Salad Pita Sandwiches with Broccoli Sprouts!

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

This blog started as an act of reluctant translation.

I am an analog person: kitchens, radio consoles, face-to-face organizing. Digital content was not my native language, and the earliest version of this project shows exactly what it looks like when someone who learned to communicate elbow-deep in a commercial kitchen tries to figure out how platforms work by just... doing it anyway.

What followed was an education in the gap between good content and visible content. A fermentation guide that nobody saw for weeks. A satirical piece about what institutions extract from the people they claim to serve. A video game review about capitalism that required players to win through exploitation before it would let them feel bad about it. Post after post, tagged carefully, written honestly, received in silence.

Then one person liked the fermentation video. I left them a comment. They replied, saved the post for their husband, and followed the blog.

That two-message thread taught me more about authentic engagement than anything else this project produced. You cannot shortcut the relationship. You have to show up and talk to people like a person.

That lesson is the foundation of everything being built next.

Where This Is Going

The Broccoli Sprouts Local Economy Platform (release date TBA) is a mobile-first member portal for small business owners, makers, and cooperative members in Transylvania County, NC. Here is what it is being built to do.

The Document Library puts NC-specific legal and operational templates in the hands of people who need them: LLC formation checklists, worker cooperative bylaws, contractor agreements, HR essentials. The kind of paperwork that costs hundreds of dollars an hour when a lawyer drafts it from scratch.

The Tax Prep Center pre-populates quarterly worksheets and expense trackers from your own business profile data. It does not file your taxes. It makes sure filing is never a crisis.

The Compliance Calendar sends automated reminders for the deadlines that quietly end small businesses when missed: NC annual reports, quarterly estimated tax payments, 1099-NEC thresholds, business license renewals. First-time business owners miss these not because they are careless but because nobody told them the dates existed.

The Podcast is long-form interviews with local entrepreneurs and cooperative members, the people building things in this county who are willing to say publicly how it actually works. The kind of conversation that used to happen over a back fence, recorded and made searchable.

The Sprout Score Dashboard tracks your business formation journey through the platform's botanical framework: Seed, Sprout, Growing, Rooted. Progress needs to be visible to feel real.

The Template Marketplace lets cooperative members and local professionals contribute specialized templates sold through the platform. Contributors keep 85% of each sale. Value stays with the people who generate it.

New members receive a physical Business in a Box kit: printed templates, a compliance checklist customized to their business type, and a welcome letter with local resources. For someone starting a business for the first time, something you can hold in your hands matters.

You can see the original content and code for yourself, including how this whole thing sprouted, over at CodePen.

The audience built here, however small, is the beginning of the trust infrastructure a cooperative economy requires. One mutual who saves your fermentation guide for her husband is a community member. That is the whole model.

Stay tuned for updates on the new website and what comes next.

The seed is already in the ground.