seaweed popcorn

Lucy steps off the bus a few moments before 4, bounding with energy and the stories she wants to tell us. She’s also hungry — that’s a long school day for a kid who runs hard. There’s a snack time in the morning, lunch just before noon, then nothing else until she comes home. We’ve learned our lesson. We have snack waiting in the kitchen.

That girl would eat 8 apples a day, if we let her, so if we hand her one and a hunk of good cheese, she’s happy. She doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, so homemade graham crackers or banana bread really don’t do much for her. (Her brother, however? Oh, that boy would choose the sweet treat every time.) She finds the texture of celery repugnant, so there goes ants on a log. And at this point in her life, at nearly 8 (what?!), Lucy prefers the comfort of routine. Please don’t try out any new snack recipes on her unless they are variations on a theme.

Lu approves of this seaweed popcorn we made for her recently. We’re making it again, at 3:45 pm, today.

I started thinking about making this seaweed popcorn after reading The Good Gut, a great book by Justin and Erica Sonnenburg, two leading researchers of the microbiome who work at Stanford. They wrote about complex science in an approachable fashion, then shared the changes they have put into place in their family, based on what we know about the microbiome so far. (There’s still so much to learn.)

The Sonnenburgs suggest we all add more seaweed to our diet, since it’s nutrient dense, high in calcium and the B vitamins. It’s also high in iodine. We don’t use iodized salt in our house — we choose kosher or sea salt instead — so eating seaweed on a regular basis takes care of that need for iodine. We add kombu to our beans when we braise them and to our dashi broth for miso soup, to which we add wakame. And for awhile, at Lucy’s request we had sushi Sunday every week. That’s why we have nori in the house at all times.

It’s also because roasted seaweed snack — sheets of nori roasted with oil and salted — is a big hit at snacktime on Vashon. Lucy has spent years crunching on crisp bites of nori. I’ll never forget the time she came home from preschool and told me, “You forgot to pack my seaweed snack today! Everybody had some and I didn’t have any!” That’s Vashon for you.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re lucky to have a large Asian population and we live on the coast. Seaweed is pretty easy to find here and frequently used. You might not live in a place where it’s quite as common but nori is worth seeking out or finding online.

We like adding a bit of butter to our seaweed popcorn. Of course, you can skip it if you want. But when we first tried this popcorn, popped in the pan with sesame oil, shaken together with the nori on a sheet tray, and still hot, Danny and I both tasted cheddar cheese. It’s not there when the popcorn is room temperature but it’s an unexpected taste.

With such a simple technique and so few ingredients, paying attention matters even more. When you make popcorn on the stove,  there’s something rather satisfying about shaking that pot around and around on the burner, to prevent burning, and feeling the corn pop against the sides of the pot. Desmond is fascinated by it. Give it a few more years and he’ll be the one doing this for us.

Great food doesn’t need to be wildly inventive or never-before-seen to be good. Is that even possible at this point? Us? We have about 5 snacks that work around here, time and again, with popcorn being almost top of the list. From now on, we’re throwing seaweed in it.

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