Salad from the Sea!

Yes, the forests are still busy popping up mushrooms these days, making people such as ourselves driven and giddy, but let's pause for a moment and expand our horizons to consider the wonderful resources present in the sea. What better excuse to head out in a kayak (as if one is needed!) than to harvest some of the many local seaweeds that enhance our meals, medicines, body care and general joie-de-vivre?

I did just that recently, and came home with some sea lettuce (Ulva latuca), a beautiful emerald-green seaweed with thin translucent leaves that span 20-40 cm across and have ruffed edges. It can be free-floating or grow attached to substrates, but does not have a true rooting system. Sea lettuce is often found in shallow water, near exposed rocks and stagnant tide pools. It is quite tolerant of high levels of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, so large volumes of it could be indicative of potentially polluted waters (thus making it incumbent on harvesters to only harvest in areas that known to be relatively clean and well away from contaminant outflows).

Sea lettuce has been enjoyed throughout the world for many centuries- raw, dried, or roasted; in salads, soups, or stews. It can be stored in the refrigerator for a couple of days, or frozen for up to 6 months without losing flavour. It is said to be high in protein, vitamins, minerals (notably iron), and fibre, and the term "super-food" has been associated with it more than once. After his first bite of sea lettuce-pesto, my harvesting companion, who had been yawning and ready for a post-kayak nap, declared rather uncharacteristically that his body felt abnormally full of energy and vitality.

Due perhaps to its antibacterial properties sea lettuce has been used to treat burns and as a base for body cleansers; it has been fed to livestock in many countries; has been gathered to use as packing material for "more precious" edible seaweeds and fish; and it makes a nice (and aromatic!) garden mulch.

Sea lettuce is not always associated with all-things-good however; in areas with wastewater or high nutrient loading there are instances where the algae has grown out of control, depleting oxygen and forming mats that choke out other aquatic organisms. If very large amounts wash up on the beach the rotting process can be not only smelly but dangerous- hydrogen sulphide gases build up under a crust of algae. There have been cases of people losing consciousness from these fumes, as happened this summer along a French beach plagued by high levels of agricultural run-off.

Such problems are not specific to this species of algae, and they are certainly a dire warning against over-taxing our aquatic and marine systems with pollutants. They are not, however, any reason to avoid digging into a lovely roasted sea lettuce salad (harvested from clean waters of-course):

Recipe: Roasted sea lettuce salad
6 tomatoes
1 avocado
10 gr dried sea lettuce
1 lemon
4 Tbsp olive oil
salt (to taste)

Roast the dried sea lettuce in a hot oven for 30 seconds or so, just until it becomes crispy (careful, it burns easily!). Chop the tomato and mix it with the avacado and sea lettuce, and stir in the lemon juice, olive oil and salt. Itadakimasu!

Caution: Sea lettuce is tolerant of high levels of nitrogen and phosphates, and can thus grow in areas that are polluted; make sure that your source is coming from water that is relatively clean. Luckily for sea vegetable harvesters, there are no poisonous look-alikes to popular edible species (though if you're in the tropics, avoid blue-green algae finer than a human hair).