The Incredible Lightness of Seaweed

Ask any New Yorker, supermarket shopping is a drag in the big city. If you are married in a suburban sprawl, it's one of the perks: You can go to a grocery store where aisles are wider than our NYC apartments, and buy in bulk and for cheap. A shopping cart carries your 12 packs of diet Sprite and your flour sacks from Supermarket to sports sedan, and then the kids bring the bags in from the car while you collapse in an overweight heap upon the afghan covered sofa. Us single straight male urbanites can't even have our groceries delivered (that's girl stuff). We can only buy what we can carry five or more blocks without looking strained, and if our girlfriends suggest a delivery we snap at them as we would if they told us to ask directions.  Those of us who would like to eat healthy are really up the creek when we're living alone in a studio up five flights of stairs, and we're too cheap and insecure to call Fresh Direct. The produce we get here in the Big Apple is already rotten by the time we get it home, and if you're ecologically minded you hate to buy a huge sprig of fresh basil for $2.99 only to use a "tblsp" in some namby-pamby recipe, then watch the rest of it slowly wilt in your crisper or barely functioning freezer.  

Thank Heavens, then, for the New York City Japanese supermarket!

The Japanese know about overcrowding and spoilage and how polluted air wilts lettuce. Best of all, whereas American consumer products run towards the cynical and overly safe, the Japanese throw their caution to the wind, turning whole entire shrimp – eyestalks and all – into potato chips. I wish I had the courage to ask the intimidating looking young Japanese hipsters behind the counter what some of these weird, twitching, green things are in their deli aisle, but instead I just buy the weirdest, most light-weight looking thing I can find, and try to look blasé when the cashier rings me up at M2M. (3rd and 11th).

The main staple for me has become dried seaweed. This un-perishable is an absolute must for the apartment of any OHOD (Omnivoristic Humanoid Above-ground Dweller). A bag of it will last forty years, is cheap and weighs only slightly more than air. Just add hot water and watch a scrinkly dark green twisty thing turn into a big moist square of slimy green health.

There are millions of different kinds of seaweed, some of which may not have even been discovered yet, so why go into detail about what's what. It all boils down to two kinds, the "sheet" format for rolling sushi (but this is expensive and consumes too much effort) and the shredded "just add water" kind, which is the one to go for if you're a cheap loner who needs his/her iron.

Now you're ready to turn any old boring dish into a Japanese dish (which might still be boring but will be better for you). Here's two of my patented combos:

 
The Seijun Suzuki Seaweed Omelet

If you want to prepare something exotic with what’s just lying around your kitchen some lucky Sunday morning/afternoon, man will you be glad that bag of dried seaweed’s been cooling its heels in your cabinet. Assuming you have eggs, the only other thing you’ll need is some kind of sauce other than ketchup to liven it up. The hippest recommendation is Hoisin Sauce, which they also have at the Japanese market; otherwise soy sauce will do, or plum sauce, or anything with the word sauce in it.

Soak a few pinches of seaweed in a bowl of hot water while scrambling up some eggs in a big ole American pan. Blaze a trail of seaweed across the pan, then make an “X” by doing the same from the opposite direction with a line of sauce. Flap over, flip and flap again so you have a nice burrito-shaped omelet. Cook a while longer, and then serve with some of the sauce on the side for dipping. If you have to be flippant about it, garnish with a slice of kiwi. Act all worldly when serving your newfound loved one in bed. Nod gravely and grunt like Toshiro Mifune when they comment how good it is.

 Seaweed Spinach Pine Nut Pasta

Get some soba/buckwheat noodles, dried, from the Japanese market. A lot of the brands actually separate the pasta into little bundles for you, wrapping the dried noodles in a little ribbon. Take one of those bushels out and boil it up in some water. Prepare seaweed in separate bowl. Meanwhile, sauté a pack of frozen spinach (thawed and strained) in olive or sesame oil and pine nuts. Shortly before the whole mess is done, add the seaweed to the spinach. Pour over pasta, and serve. Sprinkle with parmesan if you have some, otherwise go cheese-less, like a real man.

Yeah, so what if it's not so good tasting? Do you realize how EASY it was, and how you needed no fresh produce, and how goddamned healthy it is? How comparably unbulky this all was back in grocery form, and how the ingredients will always be there for you? Plus, there’s enough iron in that meal to forge a railroad spike! The pine nuts get a little burnt in the oil and that’s all the flavor you get. Cowboy up and deal with it, you gaijin!

At any rate, there’s chocolate for desert.

Once you have the seaweed and Hoisin sauce and soba noodles you can expand and go and get some brown rice and a rice cooker. Brown rice is all shiny and pearly and good for the stomach and crammed with complex B vitamins. Even Atkins couldn’t badmouth brown rice.

Of course, your mileage may vary. My stomach isn’t keen on tomatoes, and cheese is bad for my valve. Instead I eat seaweed and spinach and imagine my body becoming infused with iron, like Iron Man (a Marvel comics character which we can only hope will soon have his own major motion picture with either Huge Ackman in the lead or failing that, anyone but Ben Affleck). If I want variation on these incorruptible staples, I keep an eye out for a deal on fresh carrots or broccoli. And here’s a tip: you make enough for leftovers, then just slap some foil or plastic wrap over the top of your bowl and fridge it for tomorrow. Forget about Tupperware – be a cowboy! The Asian culture may already be portraying you as one, so don't let them down.

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