Tummy Tuesday : Wakame Salad

Tummy Tuesday : Wakame Salad

Tummy Tuesday has rolled around and I have not a clue.  (If you want to add your link to the Tummy Tuesday blog hop, jump down to the bottom of the post).  I don’t have any restaurant pictures lined up because I’m not eating out as often.  Restaurant portions are just too big when you’re dieting and I’ve a bad habit of cleaning my plate.  Oh well.  So what else can we do.

Ok, I’ll try an experiment.  I like Wakame Salad which is pretty simple.  It’s soy sauce, vinegar, a little sugar and sesame oil.  So I’ll try making it without sugar and oil to see how it turns out.

1/3 c dried wakame seaweed
1T rice vinegar
1T soy sauce, low sodium

and since i am not adding sugar or sesame oil, here are my alternative ingredients

2T freshly ground ginger
1 clove garlic
juice from 1/4 lime

Dried Wakame seaweed in water

Put 1/3C dried wakame seaweed in a big bowl. Cover with water.

In a bowl, pour in 1T rice vinegar and 1T soy sauce.

Peel then grate ginger until you have 2T.  If you can , use a ginger grater.  It has a little moat to catch the ginger juice as you grate which you really want to keep.  If you don’t have a ginger grater, grate directly into the bowl.  With ginger grater, after you dump the ginger and juice, use a little cold water to rinse the grater and add into the bowl.

Using a garlic press, squeeze one garlic clove.  If you don’t have one, mince the garlic.  Honestly I tried two cloves and it made the sauce very spicy but I’d kill a vampire at 50 yards so in the interest of being a good neighbor, keep it down to one clove. f you like garlic a lot and the person you’re kissing doesn’t mind, two or three cloves is fine but it does have a strong spicy flavor and overpowers the ginger at those quantities.  If you’re going on a date later, you can swap out the garlic for a little hot sauce.

Squeeze 1/4 lime juice into the bowl.  Stir the liquids in the bowl until all the ingredients are mixed.

After about 7-10 minutes, your wakame should have fluffed up in the water to fill the whole bowl.  It should be about 2 cups of wakame now. Rinse your wakame thoroughly in cold water.

Add the wakame to the bowl with the liquid.  Toss the wakame until it is thoroughly covered.  If you’re eating it with something else, it makes about two servings.

My opinion:  I liked it.  Using fresh ginger and garlic gave it flavor so that I didn’t miss the sugar or the sesame oil.  The bit of lime added a nice citrus note. I might try it again without the garlic at all.  Fresh ginger and lime might be enough with the rice vinegar and soy sauce.  Wakame doesn’t have a strong flavor on it’s own so it picks up the flavor of the sauce.

Like I said, I used 2 cloves of garlic which turned out to be too much.  One would be better so I changed the recipe to one clove. Honestly, it would be better with rice or noodles but I’m dieting so no carbs.  It feels more like a side dish, not a main dish.  Since I can’t have it with noodles, maybe next time I’ll get a spaghetti squash and try it with that.  I could also use it as a bed to lay a bit of broiled chicken on top.

Using Cronometer and choosing the Nutrition Coordinating Center Food & Nutrient Database (NCCDB) as much as possible, these are the nutritional values for my salad.

As you can see it’s 124.4 kcal if you eat the whole bowl which is a bit much.  It’s actually two servings so 1/2 all these nutritional values.  So dividing by half, it’s 62.2 kcal and provides 40% of your daily folate and 23.5% iron. The Wakame has too much salt which makes sense since it’s a sea vegetable.  So this would not be a good dish for someone on a low sodium diet even if they use the low sodium soy sauce. It’s 988.2mg salt. That’s a lot. It is low fat, only .7g but gives you a little omega-3.

That’s it.  What do you think?


From Amazon: I got my ginger grater in Chinatown in Oakland, CA. They also have them at Asian markets usually and here are a few on Amazon.

Amazon disclosure: “We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.”

Roundup of last week’s Tummy Tuesday (6/26 – 7/2/18):

1. Boston Creme Cupcake : Mary (cactus catz)
2. Chicken Fajita Omelet – Comedy Plus
3. Senryu : navigate  – Cactus Haiku
4. Cholesterol Solution Guide Review – Elsie Hagley
5. Reina de Fresa – Let’s Celebrate! – Irene
6. Brownie Baked Alaska – DeeDee

This week’s Tummy Tuesday (7/3-7/9/18):

Join the Tummy Tuesday’s blog hop. Post anything about food: a restaurant review, a recipe, food photography, a funny food quote, a food song, an essay on food — anything food-related because you know like the song says, “Food, glorious food.” Add your food blog post link below.

 

Note: The thumbnails worked pretty well last week.  Here are some quick instructions if you need a little help. You have to click “Check to accept use/privacy policy (click to read)” for your url to be accepted. When you hit enter, a little pop up box should come up so you can choose which thumbnail to show. Once you choose your image, click done.  It will ask to close the window so click ok. Give it a few minutes to do the script and resize the image and then refresh your window.  You should see your link. Be aware if you’ve entered a url in a previous Mister Linkys on anybody’s blog, not just mine, it will probably automatically propagate the fields with your previous entry so remember to change the url if you’re not doing the same post.

 

13 Replies to “Tummy Tuesday : Wakame Salad”

      1. lol, and I read it as “seaweed” and didn’t even see the typo until you mentioned it. The mind sees what it expects to. That’s hilarious.

    1. Irene in comments suggested tofu with it and I thought that might be a good idea. If you try it, let me know what you think.

  1. Sounds good, but better with less garlic. I applaud you for sticking with your food regimen. It’s not easy.

    Have a fabulous Tummy Tuesday. ♥

    1. Yeah, I’m experimenting, lol. Might be better if I waited to post the 7th or 8th experiment when it’s become perfect but I figure the journey is half the fun.

      Thank you so much for your encouragements. It means a lot to me.

      Hope you’re having a fabulous feline friday!

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