What's Cooking With Dive? Sesame Seaweed Snacks

A quick snack before we get back to the Norwich photopost.

Mike and I were talking food (as we so often do) the other day and he is feeling the health benefits of having stopped eating crisps (that's "potato chips" if you can't speak English) last summer and having replaced them with those yummy crispy seaweed snacks you get in Japanese stores.

I am a sucker for those things too but these days I find it much easier and cheaper to make them myself.
So here - if any of you are remotely interested in replacing some of the salt and fat in your diets with something healthy - is Old Dive's Sesame Seaweed Snacks recipe.

First up:
Ingredients: (all organic) …
Sesame seeds. Easy peasy.
Toasted sesame oil.
Soy sauce.
Mirin.
Wakame (fresh or dried; whatever).
I usually use big strands of wakame in my miso soup. I cut them to fit the bowl while I'm making it. But for this it is a lot less hassle to buy a bag of the dried wakame that's already cut up small (which is how you usually find it in the supermarkets … I have to go to Japanese shops to find the big stuff). This recipe is all about spending the minimum amount of time prepping and cooking and the maximum time enjoying.

If you don't have wakame or mirin (c'mon! Even bloody Sainsbury's sells it now), you can use spinach and sugar. The result is pleasant enough (it's how they make that alleged "crispy seaweed" you find in Chinese restaurants) but nowhere near as yummy and healthy as this!

Step one: Grab a handful of wakame out of the bag and soak it in cool water. Give it around fifteen minutes but it matters not one jot if you forget about it and come back and find it hours later.
This is a dish I like to make when I am working around the house, doing chores. There is such a miniscule amount of time actually spent in the kitchen that you can make this stuff almost without noticing you're doing it.

Step two: Dry fry your sesame seeds.
The amounts I am using here will give a couple of bowls worth (like the photo at the bottom of the post only twice as much) which is enough for party dips for half a dozen people or snacks for me for a week.
The total cost of ingredients used for a whole week's worth of yummy snack Heaven is around twenty pence.
Add to that the gas used in having the hob on for a couple of minutes and the oven on the very lowest plate-warming setting for twenty minutes or so and we're talking cheap food for the recession.

Toast your sesame seeds until they are beginning to turn nut brown like in the picture. It doesn't take many seconds.

Next up: take the wakame out of the water and strain it. Then what I usually do is pick up a fistful and squeeze as much of the water out of it as I can, just to cut down on drying time in the oven. We want this stuff crispy and we want it now!

Right! On to the minute or so you shall actually spend cooking this dish.
Heat up the wok and add no more than a teeny teaspoon of toasted sesame oil and woosh it about so it coats the bottom of the wok.

Add the toasted sesame seeds and the wakame and toss 'em about to mix things up a bit. When they're good and hot add a few drops of soy sauce and some good shakes of mirin (the mirin adds sweetness so Joy would want to add about a gallon while I use around a teaspoonful).

Shake things around until any liquid is soaked up (probably three seconds) and we're on to the next step.

With your oven on its very lowest setting, arrange the stuff on a baking tray (I use non-stick foil as I can just shake 'em straight off into bags for lunch).

Now go away and do whatever else you want. The wok will just need a wipe around as all the liquid has been absorbed by the wakame and it's just about clean anyway.

Come back and poke the stuff from time to time.
When it's good and crispy it's done.

This photo is crap.
The snacks are actually a lovely shade of dark green and are dry and crisp, not black and glistening and sinister like the flash makes 'em out to be. Hey ho.
It might look kinda icky but it is totally delicious, intensely flavoured, crispy, more-ish and mind-buggeringly healthy.
It also costs around £2.40 a portion in the shops (called "Izumiya Seika") and in addition to the ingredients I use they add "starch syrup, sugar, salt, MSG and trehalose", whatever the fuck that is, so with my home-made version you're not sucking down all that shit.

My version looks, feels and tastes exactly the same but is much healthier and costs a tiny fraction of the shop price. We're in a recession, people.

Next time you're doing the housework, make a week's worth of healthy snacks for a few pence while you're at it. They're also ideal for making while you're blogging. I made another batch while I was writing this and I am about to bag 'em up for snacks to eat at work this week.

WARNING: These are totally addictive!