Diana Mirkin: I am Diana Mirkin and today we are talking about those whole grains that you are supposed to be adding to your healthful diet. Whole grains are seeds of grasses. They are all seeds, they are seeds that you could sprout and grow if you wanted to. Thats the difference between a whole grain and a ground up grain. Ground up grain, should have been into flour are no longer seed. The whole grain that I am going to show you how to cook today are absolutely little palates. You could put these in your garden and you would have rice plants growing out of them and thats what we are going to be cooking and eating. The reason these are so wonderful is because seeds are natures little power house of food, all of the nutrients that a baby plant needs to grow, they have fiber, vitamins, minerals all of the essential fatty acids that a seed needs to get that plant springing into life and when you eat them you are benefiting from those nutrients. So, when you seed the seeds you know that you are actually getting everything that nature has packaged together for you.

Now, there are lots of different kinds of whole grains that are available to you when you start eating them, you are going to look around your supermarket first of all and you are going to find brown rice, every supermarket has brown rice these days. You will also find wild rice; wild rice is the grass of an aquatic plant that grows in the Northern states of the United States. Its really not rice at all, but it is a wonderful whole grain and it is widely available. You will also find barely, just about supermarket will carry barely and you probably remember barely from the soup that your grandmother made. So, thats the nice familiar whole grain. Now, when you get into whole grains and want to try some others, there are some fascinating grains that you can find if you go on a little bit of search Quinoa is one thats in some supermarkets, but you may need to go to a health food store. There are lots of different varieties of whole wheat such as Kamut that you will find if you go to specialty stores and health food stores and all of these grains cook up essentially the same way. They all get used pretty much the same way just as you would use rice or pasta.

And next we are going to learn how to cook these whole grains.