FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

This week I ate fresh seaweed which I picked from the sea myself and my taste buds had a few surprises.  It’s been a week of discovery.  I’ve been carting the back page ripped out of a Village Life magazine around with me for the last year.  It had intriguing recipes using seaweed but I never actually got around to trying them, until now.

Wikipedia informed me that seaweed has more nutritional value than many land vegetables and in fact contains Vitamin B12 which is in not found in any land veggie and which is very good for you.  There are different types of seaweed on different coastlines and they can be used in different ways.  Some taste meaty, some are eaten fresh and others are good for sushi.  We’ve bought dried sheets of seaweed from the Chinese food shops before to make sushi but that’s not the same as actually getting the fresh stuff.  I’ve now found out that I’m eating the seaweed called Nori when Theo makes sushi.

Now before you incorrectly assume that I’m a health freak living on nuts and sprouts and analyse everything which I put into my body let me just remind you that living with Theo 24 -7 does not allow for that.  I’m not skinny with pasty skin either, in fact I’m getting rounder by the day. The nuts we eat are in his home baked bread which we snack on with lavishings of butter.  I do make my own sprouts from mung beans which I buy from the Chinese food shops while Theo stocks up on sushi ingredients and other strange things like fermented black eggs or packets of odd looking curly things which we never know what the hell they are since they only have Chinese writing on the packets and the Chinese shop owners don’t speak much English at all.  Nevertheless, Theo loves experimenting with all the exotic things and I make my sprouts to put on cheese sandwiches with lavishings of butter in between eating lots of meat, fried food and Theo’s endless assortment of breads.                       

Theo has also made devine seafood dishes by stuffing sea bamboo with perlemoen (abalone) when it was still legal to collect the gift from the sea gods, or mussels taken out their shells or alikreukel.  You shove them down the bamboo, alternating with a chunk of garlic now and then, and seal the end with a thick piece of rolled up ribbon fronds from the bamboo.  You plonk the bamboo onto the coals and the food steams inside.  We slice the bamboo open but only eat the seafood inside, which has a delicious flavour from the bamboo.  Next time I’m gonna take a bite of the bamboo as well.

I never thought about eating seaweed before.  I mean, jeez the Chinese and Japanese who are healthy, live on the stuff so why the hell shouldn’t I give it a try.  And it’s free, just sitting there on the rocks for the picking.    

So there I was, on the beachfront at Kleinzee, poking around in rock pools looking for Gigartina radula.  It’s brown and covered in knobbly bumps which reminded me of a sheeps tongue but felt like a slab of squeaky rubbery plastic.  I boiled my firm knobbly rubber for 7 minutes as per the recipe by which time the caravan smelt like the depths of the ocean.  Once the stuff is boiled, not too long or it becomes slimy (ah there’s the rub) you can do a whole bunch of things with it.  I tried the first recipe which was fritters.  I dipped the now floppy bright green knobbly leaves in batter and deep fried them.  They tasted awesome.  Not salty or slimy but more meaty and had a good texture.  Theo enjoyed them.  I was keen to try the more healthy ideas, since if you’re gonna eat stuff the colour of grass you might as well go all the way.  The next day I made a egg Tortilla (that’s a fancy name for a Spanish omelette if you didn’t know).  I used some of the bright green chopped gooey leaves which I’d boiled the previous day.  They’d become a bit slimy but I wasn’t going to be put off as I draped the luminous green stuff over the diced potatoes in the pan and added a few cherry tomatoes to balance the brightness of my colourful eggs.  Theo tried a mouthful but made a face saying it was too slimy for him.  He eats snails and oysters so baa, why not my seaweed.  I encouraged him to try more, saying he wasn’t giving it a chance.  Anyway, I endure all his strange concoctions like 100year old fermented eggs and sheeps heads and fish eyes and chilli which makes me dread bowel movements for the next week.  I ate my slimy green eggs (no ham) with a determined grimace as the food slid down my throat.  He could at least pretend.   

Tomorrow he’s getting a vegetable bake with seaweed layers and then I still want to try the yummy sounding tomato soup with floating green bits.  And he better not pull a face otherwise I’m headed back to the rocks in search of the fronzy green lettuce seaweed which you eat raw and I’ll stick it on his cheese sandwich instead of my sprouts which he loves so much.              

Mmmm, maybe that’s why I never get a chance to cook.