Month: November 2012

Happy Thanksgiving! Today is the Thanksgiving day in America. It’s the day all the family members and friends gather and have reunion with traditional food such as turkey, apple pie, mash potato, and casserole. Many of you probably experienced eating too much food and next day, you gain weight, or too lazy to go Black Friday shopping.

Kombu seaweed is the effective ingredient for relieving fatigue, help you digest food and prevent fat to absorb in your system, and add umami (savory taste) in your dish. With using kombu seaweed, you could welcome your friends from far away after those long drive, and replenish their appetite.

For example, add kombu dashi stock to regular chicken bouillon when making bean casserole. In Japanese food, kombu is often paired with beans to help digest them.

If you are having vegetarian friends or relatives to your house over, you could serve them tofurkey made with tofu. Originally Tofu was used in Japanese food and it has been used with kombu seaweed as a pair. Kombu is vegan friendly food and is appreciated by them for them to. You could use kombu for stuffing wild rice in your tofurkey. Before stuffing them in, cook wild rice with dashi water and can add saddle savory taste in it. You could also arrange it with your taste using left over turkey

our unpardoned turkey! / Jeff Sandquist
Im sure there are people who go lining up to cue to get your Black Friday and get ready for shopping spree weekend through Cyber Monday, prepare yourself with kombu umami jolt.

Whoever reading this blog are probably health conscious and heard or know of Paleo diet. It has been getting lot of buzz and spotlight as many celebrities are practicing this diet. Paleo diet is gluten-free dietary and life style of Paleolithic homo sapience when main activities of the time was hunting and harvesting. There are many variations to this diet but basis of Paleo diet is to live like cave man, so you don’t get to eat any sugar, grains, salt or any seasonings. Instead, you could eat meat as much as you want, not worrying about any calories. Homo sapience was more active than how people live in modern life but they didn’t take in carbon hydrate, which is main component of modern diet. Thus, Paleo diet is going back to primitive dietary such as eating none carbon hydrated food when one gets hungry, sleeping when you want to sleep. It has been getting lot of buzz and spotlight as many celebrities are practicing this diet and kombu seaweed comes handy in this diet.

Since way to refine salt and sugar was not established, they can not be used in the diet too. If you just read this, it sounds like it has lot of limitation to this diet. However, as long as you avoid eating beans and grains, you could eat as much as you want not caring about calories. Moreover, you could take some break from Paleo diet occasionally and have some modern food as it is hard to prepare every meal without any of the prohibited ingredients and need to be stress free and if this diet is causing stress, it’s like putting the cart before the horse. Even without salt or sugar, by taking in nutrient rich product in your diet such as vegetables, seaweeds and nuts. Seaweeds are excellent source of vitamin B, magnesium, as well as a great source of iron, calcium, iodine, and the pantothenic acid. Seems like cave man knew the nutritional value of seaweeds and kombu, it has been used in medical and food from 20,000 years ago.　You can not only flavor your food with kombu, they can substitutes salt and add nutrients food and is perfect food for Paleo diet. Paleo Diet News, a news blog for Paleo diet, have article for kombu as a super food for Paleo diet.