Cooking with Sea Vegetables

Vegetables from the sea bring you 97 different vitamins, minerals, enzymes and probably nutritional elements our food scientists haven’t discovered yet. Their flavors are mild. Try cooking wakame with kale and garlic You can get dried sea vegetables of several kinds at Minglement.

Those I like best to use are kelp, hijiki, wakame, and nori. Soak Hijiki until the tiny black pods swell and turn the soaking water brown. Japanese eat it as a vegetable side dish sprinkled with white sesame and rice vinegar. I make a global minestrone soup by combining a spoonful of dried kelp flakes or hijiki and its nutritious brown soaking water with my usual minestrone vegetables and meat scraps plus garlic. If you have my cookbook Island Epicure’s Excellent Soups and Stews, sold at Minglement, you have several versions of this delicious, health-giving Italian soup that saved my life when I had pneumonia in Florence, Italy a few decades back.

I like to have some cooked rice in the refrigerator. It can be the basis for many dishes, rice cakes for breakfast or lunch for instance. Stir half of a cupful of cooked rice with an egg, a tablespoon or two per serving of chopped red bell pepper, a sliced green onion, and a tablespoonful of soaked dried wakame. Fry the mixture by rounded tablespoons in a wide skillet with olive oil.

 Sushi Rice with Prawns
2 to 3 servings

1 cup cooked brown rice
1 Tablespoon dried wakame pieces
1 Tablespoon sugar (I use coconut sugar for its low Glycemic Index: 35 GI vs. cane sugar’s 100)
2 Tablespoons rice vinegar or 1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 Tablespoon sherry or mirin
1 Tablespoon finely minced ginger root
3 prawns
Salt to taste

Poach the prawns in water to cover and a lemon slice and 1 Tablespoon minced onion. Cool, shell, and slice the prawns. Stir them with the rest of the ingredients listed above. Serve warm.

Norimaki: Cook ½ cup sweet rice starting it in cold water so it will be sticky. Mix the rice, vinegar and sherry or mirin.  Place a row of spoonfuls of rice 1-inch from the edge of a nori sheet. Flatten the row. Lay a strip of wasabi mustard paste down the center of the rice’s length. Now put on a row of poached, shelled prawns and a green onion or two. Roll up the nori, pressing to hold the rice together. This works best if you started the rice cooking in cold water so it will be sticky.  You should have enough rice for two rolls of norimaki.

Cut the norimaki rolls into one-inch chunks. Behold and enjoy homemade sushi. Leftover cooked salmon goes well in place of prawns.

 Miso Soup with Wakame
2 servings

2 cup boiling water
4 teaspoons miso or to taste
2 skinny or 1 fat green onion, thinly sliced aslant
2 teaspoons wakame flakes

Dissolve the miso in the boiling water in 2-cup Pyrex measure. Stir in the wakame flakes. Divide between two soup bowls. Garnish with green onion. This quick, easy soup makes a tasty first course for a lunch or dinner.