These two things popped into my head when I woke up this morning. I love hummingbirds. People very dear to me love hummingbirds too. I also love seaweed, something I never thought I'd say a few years ago! Anyway, I decided to cook up some wakame seaweed today because I need to alkalyze (there's that word again) and I really like to eat wakame in a miso soup. And I also thought that I'd try to find an alternative to the sugar water they want me to put in the new bird feeder that Gundy gave us for Christmas. Sugar can't be good for hummingbirds, can it? I don't know...
Wakame Seaweed and "The Black Stallion"
I discovered that after I soak the seaweed for at least 10 minutes (it usually ends up soaking longer than that while I'm doing other things) and rinse it thoroughly, there is practically no "seaweed smell" when it cooks. It tastes delicious, not at all what I was expecting the first time I tried it -- it tastes kind of nutty.
The first time I put some in my mouth, an image came to mind of the shipwrecked little boy eating sea kelp to survive, in the movie "The Black Stallion." He looked so satisfied while he was eating it! (The boy was named Alec, played by Kelly Reno, in the 1979 version of the movie.) And it was that image that helped give me courage to eat the seaweed, which turned out to not be needed at all — I loved it!
The seaweed I got from Rising Tide Sea Vegetables in our grocery store, and the directions for cooking it I got from Julia Ferre's cookbook, Basic Macrobiotic Cooking, which is available for purchase at the George Ohsawa Macrobiotic Foundation's website. This is a really good cookbook, and the Rising Tide seaweed is top-notch!
Food for Hummingbirds
I hold a lot of admiration for hummingbirds. They can travel incredible distances without stopping to eat or drink. They are remarkable!
The instructions that came with our new Hummingbird feeder says "1 Part Sugar to 4 parts water; No sugar substitutes; No Honey; Heat to Dissolve Allow to Cool." I don't know... maybe I'll just hang it as a decoration next to our Hazel and Fuschia bushes, both of which I know for a fact the hummingbirds flock to when the flowers are in bloom.
