Dulse is a deep red sea vegetable (aka: seaweed), and I was able to find it at PCC in a dry form. It has VERY high iron and mineral content - something I need a lot of ever since my pregnancy with Ivo. 1/3 C has about 19% of your daily iron requirement!
As with all these new raw foods adventures, I'm using Feeding the Whole Family as my inspiration. Though I still stand by every glowing thing I've ever said about this WONDERFUL book, the Dulse Salad with Lemon Tahini dressing just about made me barf!!! It takes a LOT to do that to me.
However, that was no fault of the dulse. In fact, I found the dulse pretty mild in flavor and can see how it would blend well into almost any salad. My problem was with the massive amount of red onion the recipe required. Actually, I only included 1/2 of what the recipe asked (one WHOLE thinly sliced red onion).
So, here's what my version of the recipe included:
1/2 thinly sliced red onion
2 large, chopped celery ribs
~1 C of dulse, soaked in cold water and thoroughly rinsed
toss veggies with 1 (maybe it was even 2) tbsp unfiltered apple cider vinegar (b/c I didn't have br. rice vinegar) and a pinch of sea salt
The dressing:
1/2 cup tahini
juice of 1 lemon
1 clove crushed garlic
1 tsp Tamari (LOVE this stuff... it's soy sauce, but better... we'll talk about it later)
1/3 cup water
(It was also supposed to have olive oil, but I was running low and left it out. No biggie- it was still really tasty dressing)
Ms. Lair recommends chilling the veggie mix for 1 hour and then serving it on a red lettuce leaf with the dressing on top. I chilled it for about 2.5 hours then tossed it with my baby greens mix from my produce delivery box and some of the dressing.
Our first reactions were, "Wow, this is really good!" Then we both started saying, "whoa, too much onion... whoa, this is giving me heart burn." Then, Brendan finished his, but I choked down one more bite, and then had to consciously not vomit the whole thing back into my plate. WAY. TOO. MUCH. ONION. On a positive note, I feel like I for once ate enough raw onion to maybe experience some of it's reported antibiotic properties... too bad I will try to NEVER do that again.
So, next time- less onion! more celery! more vinegar! I'll let ya know how it goes.
Moral of the story: If it seems like something in a recipe is going to be gross to you, it probably is going to be gross to you. If it's something you've never tried, do it anyway. If it's a well known quantity, then having it in a new recipe probably won't magically make it good. For example, eating 1/4 of a raw onion will probably taste like eating one quarter of a raw onion!
As for dulse, I'm ALL about it, and I'll definitely buy it again. I'm eager to try toasting it and grinding it into flakes to make a sprinkle-on, salty, veggie-booty-esque additive. Cynthia recommends doing this for baby food. Great idea!