Bury it! Incorporating sea weeds into foods

This is a technique to introduce yourself and your loved ones to new foods that you may not like or think that you will not like! But a food can’t be good for you unless you eat it so creating good tasting and familiar meals is paramount.

Seaweed: also known as sea-vegetables, are the plants that grow around the continents of the earth and have been part of our diets through the ages.

An excellent way of introducing them to the diet is to add them to the cooking water and broths of many recipes such as spaghetti, soup and stew and when cooking beans, peas and lentils. In the later case seaweed has the ability to help with the digestibility of these foods while adding their rich source of minerals.

Here is a dynamite recipe for spaghetti – everyone will love it and never know what all they are eating!

Chop a whole onion and cook it in a heavy pan in coconut oil on a medium heat. While these are cooking chop a variety of vegetable to add to the cooking onions; carrots, shiitake mushrooms, parsley including the stems, garlic, peppers, etc.
An optional boost is to also add a teaspoon to tablespoon of ground turmeric to the pan and cook in the coconut oil. This herb will give your spaghetti a beautiful golden color while helping ward off conditions of inflammation and disease.

After the vegetables have begun to wilt add the ground meat of your choice; hamburger, ground turkey or chicken, etc. and break up and stir round to brown a bit. Then add your tomato base – fresh if you have it, which I seldom do – or cans of organic diced or crushed tomatoes and a small can of tomato paste. Heat this through and add your sea vegetable – this can be whole kombu fronds or small pieces of wakame, hiziki, fucus (bladderwrack) etc. These can be soaked and chopped before adding, but include the soaking water too. Add salt to taste and herbs such as rosemary, oregano or thyme and put on a simmer for about an hour.
Note: if you have used the whole kombu you will have great pieces of seaweed in your spaghetti when it is done which does not serve our purposes of hiding and burying the unfamiliar. To solve this and work magic on your sauce pull out the pieces and put them on a cutting board and cut up the now soft pieces into small pieces that will be undetectable in the final dish. Cut one way then across the other way until the frond is mush then put back into the dish and stir well.

Check for seasoning, and add more salt if necessary. Chop some cilantro and stir in just before serving so that it keeps its bright green color.

Serve over pasta. Some of the new whole-wheat pastas are much improved over the early versions and make the meal more hearty and filling with all the ingredients of the whole grain.