Our Hebridian cousins are celebrating Burns night with haggis, tatties and neeps. Cornwall, resplendent in winter for its seas, wildlife and actually moderate temperatures, has a strong connection with Scotland. Like us, they famously gather seaweed and use it as a nutritious vegetable in all sorts of recipes to ward off winter flu and keep strong. We’ve made a delicious recipe for sea spaghetti and haggis stew over on the recipes section. As Tim says, when you think of the harsh environments sea vegetables are exposed to: changing tides, temperature, salinity and the unpredictable and ever changing tide, sea vegetables are pretty durable things. This is why they’re so good for keeping up the strength. Vastly becoming a ‘trend’ of 2015, seaweed has been popular by people on the extremities of the UK for some time now.

As well as eating seaweed to stay strong and healthy, we’ve found detox baths to be particularly comforting at this time of year. When your skin is confused by the lack of moisture with artificial heating, the gelatinous and moisturising properties of seaweed are really comforting and leave skin silky smooth.

Thankfully Burns’ words resound to see January out. From Tam O Shanter: “But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white–then melts for ever.” remind us that this wild month will soon be saying goodbye as we welcome in February and the tilt toward spring time. With light drizzle comes milder nights and the first buds of spring.

This week has seen us sending samples to chef Tess Ward, who is up for creating new dishes using our dried, harvested seaweeds from our beautiful peninsula. We’re also sending some off to be trialled with Mr. Eco himself: James Strawbridge. With a ton of exciting new foodie ventures to announce for the some, we hope this means our seaweed will be getting on even more plates and dishes by venturing further afield.

 

Following the array of articles proclaiming sea vegetables as #superfoods to kick the year off, like this one we found in the Times, we’ve seen a lot of cool recipes starting to kick around; making the internet an altogether more seaweed friendly place.

 

 

 

Also, along with some other great producers, we had a mention in a Country Living article entitled The Power of Seaweed, which is a common theme in our tweets and marketing strategy. Its many uses include, of course, flavouring and reducing salt, but recently it has been used to create furniture, cocktails and many interesting displays of art work. We have decided to go ahead an apply to have an exhibition on Redcliffe Bridge in Bristol later in the year, so watch this space for that!

We’ve also been chatting to Alice-Azania Jarvis who is writing a feature on seaweed for a paper. We’ll give you some more information about that next week, but it’s all very exciting stuff, and set to continue the enormous traction sea vegetables have had this year. So, there’s plenty more news we have to tell you, but that’ll come next week.

Til then: stay fantastic!