The Chia Challenge

“Would you like to try some chia seeds?” my mom asked me last week. Little did I know this was a trap. The next day, a 2.2 pound bag of chia seeds was staring at me—mocking me—every time I opened the fridge. Was this going to be another teff flour incident? Was this going to be yet another bag of something I’d never figure out how to use? No! I was going to conquer those chia seeds. Unlike the teff flour (and the dried lime leaves, yellow soybean paste and instant corn flour…all of which have languished in my kitchen for years) I was going to use those damned seeds. The Chia Challenge had begun.

Daughter #1 was quick to suggest that I was being a bit of a drama queen. Apparently, it’s easy to use chia seeds. Just take one cup of milk, mix in some sugar and two tablespoons of the seeds and refrigerate overnight. Guess what you have in the morning? Chia seed pudding.

Right.

Have you seen chia seed pudding? Picture squeezing the guts out of a kiwi, whirling it up in a blender and then bleaching away the green. There you have it—white sludge with black bits suspended in it.

Have you tried chia seed pudding? I have two words for you: Dinosaur snot. There’s a texture issue with chia seed pudding that’s hard to describe, but I’m going to try—picture watery slime with soft but crunchy black ants mixed in. I’d say it reminds me of tapioca pudding, but I don’t want to insult tapioca.

A 2.2 pound bag of chia seeds contains 98 tablespoons of seeds—that’s 49 servings of dinosaur snot. No. Just…no.

So I consulted an expert—Google. Turns out lots of recipes use chia seeds. Turns out it’s easy to use up 98 tablespoons of chia seeds. There’s a catch, of course—every recipe that uses chia seeds also includes ingredients that are either stunning expensive or not available in normal grocery stores. Whole vanilla pods, pink peppercorns, raw hazelnuts, almond milk and rice milk (ew), grain-free flour…

So I’m back to dinosaur snot pudding. In 49 days, I’ll be finished all 49 bowls of it and this damned bag of seeds should be empty. Wish me luck.