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Cooking (and Enjoying) Sea Vegetables with Brett Mayette

The other bounty of the sea with Conscious Cuisine

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When you think of delicious things that come from the ocean, seaweed is definitely not at the top of that list. Yes, seaweed salad is tasty, and yes, seaweed is an important part of sushi, but when Brett Mayette invited me to his Cooking With Sea Vegetables class in Narragansett, I couldn’t think of another way that I would actually want to eat it. It turns out there are a lot of easy and delicious applications in the kitchen for seaweed, and a lot more varieties and flavors than I expected.

But before we get into how you can eat seaweed, let’s talk about why you would ever want to. “Seaweed has vitamins and minerals from the sea, plus trace minerals which are hard to find in foods and are really important to health,” Brett says. “My goal is to show people how to incorporate these things into familiar foods.” Through his decades of work in the food industry – you’ve probably seen him before at Basil’s of Narragansett, where he worked for years – Brett developed a passion for using food as medicine. He has done an apprenticeship as an herbalist, and founded Conscious Cuisine. His goal is to help people diversify their diets, finding surprisingly delicious and healthful food sources right in our own backyards. Take, for example, dandelion root. You can eat the crown and leaf of the plant, and, Brett says, it has 20% of the vitamins and minerals you need in a day. There are surprises like that all around. During the spring and summer, he leads Weed Walks, where he teaches people what you can and should eat from nature, and holds Foraged Foods classes. But for today, we’re eating seaweed.

I sit down at his kitchen island, and Brett hands me a cup of seaweed tea. “It’s not for everyone,” he says, and promises me I don’t have to drink it if I don’t want to, “but I love it.” Since he’s gone to all the trouble of making it, and I’ve decided to take a leap of faith with this class, I take a sip. And to my surprise, it’s really not bad. With the little bit that I drink, I’ve knocked one more plant off my list: for optimal health, Brett has just told me, you want to try to eat around 150 different plants every few months. Eating a plant-heavy diet is important, he explains, but people tend to fall into patterns of eating the same few, and not getting as diverse a nutrient base as they could. Throughout the class, I try five different kinds of seaweed: in appetizers, in main courses, even in dessert. (Yes, really, dessert.) And it’s a good thing I do, because a quick lesson in the health benefits of sea vegetables has me convinced that I need to eat more. Seaweed can help control blood sugar and cholesterol, promotes heart health, detoxifies the body, promotes weight loss, reduces asthma… the list goes on.


To my surprise, everything we eat is delicious. Brett walks the class through a few appetizers, like an Arame, Corn and Rice Vinegar Salad and his “Best Ever” Tuna Apple Salad, which really is the best tuna I’ve had. For main courses, we make a robust, veggie-full Miso Soup meal, and a Shrimp Stir Fry. To my surprise, he treats the seaweed mostly as an herb – you can use it in small amounts for a salty, umami flavor, and you don’t need to eat much to get the health benefits. About that dessert? It’s a fruit tart, set with a seaweed gel instead of gelatin. It’s clear and tasteless, just like the goopy stuff out of the box, but it’s a much better (and vegan) health choice. To my surprise, it’s something I could see myself making at home. It turns out I’ve got a whole new seafood to explore. Brett is hosting Conscious Cuisine November 18 and 29, and December 9 and 29.

ConsciousCuisineRI.com

concious cuisine, sea vegetables, seaweed, seaweed salad, brett mayette, julie tremaine, vegan

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