Taste it! Sliced pears (soaked in lemon water to prevent browning) encircling a bed of grated carrot, topped with chopped celery, toasted pecans, and rehydrated dulse cut finely with scissors or knife. Dress with fresh orange juice and olive oil, half & half.
Life evolved from single-celled creatures living in the nutrient-rich ocean. Seaweeds concentrate these nutrients, and when you make soup that includes seaweed, you are nourishing your body’s inner ocean that is around and in the cells of your body. The Seaweed Soup Mix offered at theseaweedman.com is a chopped blend that is 60% laminaria digitata kelp (similar to Japanese kombu used to make dashi, a delicious soup broth), 25% alaria esculenta (similar to Japanese wakame), and 15% laminaria longicruris, a delicate Maine kelp. This is the blend that I use in my own kitchen. I serve soup several times a week. After all, our bodies are mostly water, and we transact with seaweed and veggies at the level of water. Here is a recipe:
I start by filling a four quart soup pot half full of water. I turn on the heat and add four tablespoons of Seaweed Soup Mix. I add three tablespoons of rice or barley. I add a couple of slices of ginger root. I add three dried shitake mushrooms. I peel a few cloves of garlic and toss them in. When the pot comes to a boil, I turn down the heat. When the mushrooms have rehydrated, I remove them to cool, and then I slice them and return them to the soup pot. In a separate pan, I saute’ a medium size sliced onion with liberal sprinkles of thyme. I like to use sesame oil or coconut oil. When the onion slices are golden, I set them aside. I slice root crops like carrots, parsnips, rutabaga, beets, and turnips. When the grain is al dente (soft enough to chew), I add the root crops. If I want a sweeter soup, I might add a few slices of delicata squash and some cut sweet corn. (In midsummer, I would add cut string beans and summer squash.) During the last three minutes of cooking, I add greens like parsley and kale, and I add the saute’d onions. I season with Eden organic shoyu soy sauce (no alcohol) and sometimes a dash of cayenne. I serve up the soup with a topping of fresh parsley and/or chopped chives. When I reheat this soup on the second day, I add more parsley. The seaweed creates a rich creamy broth that boosts the savory flavors of this soup. Yum!
Seaweeds have their seasons of peak vitality just like plants in the garden. In mid-May, kelp plants (laminaria longicruris and laminaria saccharina) are in their prime. On the land, dry air blows in with high pressure from Canada, and in the afternoon, a southwest sea breeze helps dry the kelp that is hung up on lines at the high water line. Mornings are flat calm, sometimes there is fog, and we journey to the kelp beds by reading the signs on the water. For instance, sometimes there is a cross-hatch pattern on the water. I call this a “mixing pattern”. It is created when the incoming tide splits and flows around the islands at the mouth of my bay. When I hear an apprentice exclaim, “Oh! Look! The mixing pattern! I KNOW where we ARE!”—then I know that s/he is beginning to pay attention to reading the signs on the water.
Cross-hatch pattern on water
In the springtime, early morning new moon tides are the lowest. Early morning full moon tides are also lower than average. We pull on our wetsuits around 4 a.m., and we’re on the water by 4:30 a.m. Apprentices get their breakfasts around 3:30 a.m. if they’re going to have one. (When I was a young man growing up in Minnesota, I worked summers on my aunt and uncle’s 1000 acres farm. During hay season, we fed a hundred head of cattle and 50 pigs right after breakfast at first light. A good day on the farm during hay season, working with a family crew of 5 or 6 people, was a thousand bales of hay into the barn by the end of the day, around 9 or 10 p.m. This is where I learned the work ethic, “If I do not work, these worlds will perish.”)
The journey to the kelp beds takes about an hour. There’s a two hour window of opportunity to pull kelp into the boats. The goal is to pull 2000 pounds into the boats within two hours.
Larch pulls kelp into a punt boat
Coming home takes an hour. We all take a mid-morning break, getting out of our wetsuits, taking showers and warming up. Then we have a substantial breakfast. This is the meal that’s going to be with us as we hang up the kelp. The rest of the day is spent in the open air and sunshine, and if you just want a mantra to keep your hands busy while your soul ripens, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to handle approximately 2000 pieces of kelp, pinning each individual piece of kelp to clotheslines set up on the high water mark in the cove.
Kacie Hangs Up Kelp
By the end of the day, we have all done an honest day’s work, and here’s the proof:
Kelp hanging on lines in the cove
In April when I launch the boats into the cove to start the seaweed harvest season, I always ask the universe directly for an omen. Then I listen and watch. (I’ve been doing this for forty years.) One year an eagle hovered over me. That felt like blessing and protection. One year I was standing in a newly launched boat, checking for leaks, and a fish swam up to me. It was a smelt, right on the surface. I picked it up, we gazed at each other for a moment, and then I put it back in the water, and we went on our separate journeys. One year seven herons flew in formation through the cove. Herons are usually solitary stalkers. That was a beautiful omen. One year I was very impatient, demanding an omen. I spotted something washed up in the rockweed on the high tide line of the cove. It was a rubber bath toy, like a squeaky rubber duck, only this one was a cross-eyed crab with “Made in China” printed on its bottom, as if to say, “I don’t know what’s going on. Do you? All I can say is that it’s been a whirly-swirly journey.” That year the season was like that. There was no great Plan. We just let the winds and the tides carry us through, and somehow the work got done.
All the Way from China!
This year, digging in the garden, the apprentices found a salamander. I took that as a good omen, portending a lot of primordial energy in the garden, and the garden was, in fact, very lush and abundant. (The soil in my garden, by the way, is totally fertilized with seaweed, resulting in a dark rich loam.)
But there was no omen for the seaweed harvest. I decided to simply be patient and wait. I had four young men as apprentices. They would get distracted. One day Nina said to me, “There’s a Yiddish expression that describes your situation with these boys.” “Tell me,” I said. Nina smiled, “When you hire a boy, you got a boy. When you hire two boys, you got half a boy. When you hire three boys, you got no boy at all.” I laughed, “Nina, I’ve got four boys. I could be in deep trouble, except that the fourth boy is Jay (my son), and he counts for two.” We did, in fact, accomplish all the harvesting, drying, and packaging that I had set out to do, and on the final day of the alaria season (June 30th), we were finishing up a harvest on Bonny Chess Ledge, a place as beautiful as it sounds.
The tide was starting to come back in, and the boys had stripped off their wet suit jackets and were jumping into the surf to cool off. I lay down on a sloping ledge, six feet from the water’s edge. I thought, “Be grateful. You’ve accomplished what you set out to do. Now just relax. Let all your tensions go. In yoga, the Dead Man’s Pose is the hardest pose to do…..relaxing the body AND the mind.” As I relaxed, I turned my head to look toward the water, and there was a healthy baby seal, scootching toward me. I know the language of baby seals, so I spoke to it in its language. Every time I spoke, the seal scootched closer. Finally we were two feet apart, lying parallel to each other, rolled on our backs and looking up at the sky, utterly content. Then we turned and gazed into each other’s eyes. I said to the seal, this time in my own language, “You are so beautiful.” The seal responded with an affectionate puppy growl. I was a little surprised, and then I realized that this good-natured sound was the omen. One of the apprentices noticed what was happening and started to walk toward us. “Max,” I said, “get down low and roll over here. Don’t raise your arms.” Max rolled slowly, and finally we sandwiched the seal between us. We didn’t touch it. We talked and gazed. The seal remained totally relaxed. Finally I got up and resumed my work, loading bushel baskets of alaria into the punt in order to shuttle the alaria out to the container boat. Before I rowed away, I rowed up to the seal. The seal remained, a relaxed member of the group. Seal pups have very open playful hearts. Sometimes I will come upon a newborn seal that still has teeth marks on the umbilical cord stump where the mother chewed it off. There may be a fresh placenta nearby. In that case, I might talk to the seal just a little bit, and then leave quietly so that the mother will return. I’ve been around seals for 40 years, and they swim around me while I’m doing my work. This year, a baby seal brought the season’s omen-blessing, and I’m awash with gratitude as I remember that day.
Baby Seal, Sun-Blissed
Early in life, even though I have a college degree and have taught school and worked in hospitals, I took a direction to stay in the world of physical labor, doing something productive, to be of real concrete service to the world and to keep me in shape. At age 63, I do not regret that decision. My weight (155 lbs.) and blood pressure (120/68, resting pulse 55) remain the same as when I was in high school, and I still require only 5-6 hours of sleep to feel rested and alert.
I have never bought health insurance, and I have not been in hospital during my adult life, since the time I started cooking for myself in my mid-20’s. In my own kitchen, I use seaweed soup mix because it gives me nonspecific immunity to most of the bacteria and viruses that simply cannot live within my well-mineralized and alkaline bloodstream. I also eat dulse, and its antiviral properties boost my immune system once again. I’ve never had flu. People ask, “Won’t salt raise your blood pressure?” The answer is that salt is not the culprit. Poor quality oil tends to harden and block the circulatory system. I use olive oil for salads, refined sesame oil in the frying pan, and I eat a lot of avocados and fish for beneficial oils. Seaweeds make the circulatory system (and the entire body, for that matter) more flexible, and that helps keep blood pressure normal.
Now you may think that I was born with strong genes, but actually, as a child I had pneumonia four times before age ten, I was given the live polio vaccine and I developed polio as a result! My father was dying at home while I was ages 7,8,9,10. That was a lot to overcome……and I have! After my father died, I prayed to my father’s spirit, asked him to guide me, and my good health in a beautiful place on the planet is the result. There are good reasons to open to ancestors who love us and have passed over into the spiritual world. Traditional cultures teach that those who have loved in this world, then passed over into the spiritual world, have much more clarity, so please don’t think of your ancestors as static images. They are active and evolving rapidly, and we need to offer our gratitude to them for the suffering they endured so that we can be alive and loving in this world right now.