Nori grows in most seas of the world, in the upper tidal zone, wherever waters are colder than 25 degrees Centigrade for part or all of the year. It is very high in balanced, assimilable protein (more nutritional information is in the Nori Recipes section of the cookbook), much higher than any other sea vegetable. To survive, its spores bore into shells and produce a pinkish filamentous growth, which in turn reproduces the edible nori blades when conditions are right.

All of the thirty species of Porphyra are edible; most are delicious. American harvesters have taken to calling Porphyra by its beautiful Japanese name, nori. It has many other names, includ- ing the English laver and the Kashaya Pomo mei bil (sea leaf).

On the Pacific Coast of North America, nori grows wild from Baja California into Alaska. Nori is found on the Atlantic Coast as well. Nori is a red algae, though it is not really red in color. It has a gossamer-thin blade, one or two cells thick, attached to rocks or to other seaweeds by a tiny disc-shaped holdfast with no stipe. Nori blades may be from an inch to two or three feet long.

The most commonly harvested species of nori grow draped from rocks on the mid- to high-intertidal zones. Underwater, nori looks like a thin, black-gray-purple-pink, tattered piece of slightly iridescent velvet. Dangling damply from rocks, it is usually steel-grey in color, appearing like ruffled pieces of thin, limp, translucent plastic. Exposed to the sun at low tide, nori blades quickly dry. The best quality blades are jet-black, looking like swaths of tar on the rocks.

The really distinctive feature of nori is its cellophane-like thinness. At first I confused Iridea with nori; but Iridea is a lot more than two cells thick, is much more iridescent, and doesn't have that rich, sweet, almost meat-like taste when dried. (Wet nori is pretty tasteless until chewed for a long time, and tough.)

Honeyware, wing kelp, lady's tresses, tangle-the sweet names for Alaria sing of the love people have for this beautiful, magnificently abundant genus of marine algae. The long, broad, gracefully flowing ribbons of Alaria cling to rocks in the lower intertidal zones of many nations. Alaria is a staple for commercial harvesters on both the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of North America. Often Alaria is marketed in America as wakame, because of its similarity to Japanese wakame (Undaria).

Alaria fronds are olive-green to brown. We observe the young wakame growing, but don't harvest until the blades mature in size and flavor. Harvestable wakame fronds are about six to ten inches wide and up to several yards long. A flat midrib of uniform width, an inch or so wide, extends the length of the frond. Young growth pushes older growth ever outward on the frond, slowly in the winter, ever more rapidly in spring and summer. Usually the tip is tattered with decaying growth, and in the spring may look like a thick rat's tail with tough winter growth pushed outward by the surge of spring life.

The most distinctive features of Alaria are the olive-green, rubbery, oval blades up to two or three inches long called sporophylls, growing on both sides of the stipe just above the holdfast attaching the plant to the rock. Always harvest Alaria by cutting the main blade well above the sporophylls, leaving sporophylls and stipe attached to the rock. Alaria will regenerate from sporangia on the sporophylls. During the spring-summer surge of growth, the cut blade will continue to grow like an endlessly generating ribbon; the same plant often can be harvested two or three times in one season.