Dulse (my experiment of the day)

I was just looking up shopping for organic groceries online...wondering what's out there. Earlier I looked up rare and exotic spices but then quit before I was very far along. I've actually tried, and am familiar, with many of them. On the first few pages, I had tried about 70% or so of the rare spices. So that leaves something new still.

One thing I bought, without knowing what it was, at the healthfood store, was dulse. I almost always read the lable to everything and if I'd known it was seaweed, I would have checked to see where it was from, what shores it was picked from.

But I bought it and then found out it was seaweed and I did look up a couple things, just the wiki description, before trying it out. When I read the description, after having smelled it without cooking it, I thought, "I think fried would be good."

I have the flake or crumbled up version but it's not dated. Just dried. So I coated the pan with olive oil and spilled in dulse, and I added cumin. I didn't read to add cumin, but the thought came up and I decided, yeah, cumin.

So I fried dulse with cumin powder and it was very good. I ate it like that, with nothing else, by the spoonful, and thought, "I could make miso soup with this" and had cooked soybeans the night before. So I looked up how to make miso, thinking it must be out of something like dulse and soybeans and it is. It's made out of "bonito" which sounds Italian or Spanish and is a fish flake but includes seaweed flakes. Miso includes a yeast but I think you could make a broth the other way too.

It was sort of nice and reminded me of fish but it's not fish! It's fully vegan.

I did think, "I don't know how great this is...This is like bottom-feeder food or something." I mean, mussels and dulse growing off of rocks in the ocean...it just doesn't sound very sanitary or appealing when you're walking around the beach and people are climbing all over the rocks and there is this dirty barnacles stuff growing all over rocks and I'm walking all over dulse and trying to avoid getting stung by jellyfish.

I don't eat mussels now, but always felt a little timid about it even though I love them (am I supposed to love this? I don't CARE! I do!). And then with dulse the same thing came to my mind. I was thinking, "What's next. Catfish?" Nah, no fish. But I did wonder exactly where this dulse came from.

I like it though, for a good snack or pick me up or a fish substitute. So I started thinking about all the different varieties of seaweed and how they might differ in taste.

And the other night, I made a list of beans I want to make falafel and hummus and things but I started adding it up and on my budget, it was adding up fast.

I told my Mom to take astragalus for her cold tonight, because she's using echinachea, which I also use and like, but I think she could astragalus too.

Oh, I liked the dulse so much I had second helpings but I decided to throw in mashed potatoes and that drowns out the flavor. I thought, "hmm, it's not exactly fish & chips" but I added balsamic vinegar and it was better. I almost added a squeeze of lemon too, but didn't and it was good with just the balsamic over it. You could probably get the ribbons of dulse and fry them and then make homemade fries and it would be like that.

The cumin goes nicely with dulse.

I just checked online and yes! many recipes with dulse and cumin...some sound really good.

I am used to using a lot of spices together and combining but I guess lately I've wanted to single things out more and then wait and see.

I made a few other things but this was my experiment.

I was just thinking, you might even be able to bread dulse like fish and fry it for fish and chips. I'll probably try it sometime.

I liked having fresh Granny Smith apple slices after my mashed potato-dulse-balsamic vinegrette. It was a good counter to the other and I was drinking tea too.

I liked the dulse with cumin the most, and I had other good things that I made, but they weren't all complementary--anyway, don't need to write about everything.