Seaweed Salad from the Tomb Raider Cookbook
The next dish I made from the Tomb Raider Cookbook was Seaweed Salad, a recipe of Japanese origin. The recipe recommends using wakame, a sweet variety of seaweed, but I used nori, the same kind you'd use to make sushi rolls. Whatever you use, the seaweed is tossed with a dressing and sesame seeds for garnish.
Lara Croft has visited Japan twice in the Tomb Raider franchise. In Tomb Raider: Legend, she attends a cocktail party in Tokyo where she confronts Shogo Takamoto, a Yakuza kumicho (boss) who has a fragment of Excalibur she's after. Their confrontation leads to a thrilling climb up scaffolding to the apex of a skyscraper where Lara fights him for the piece.
The entirety of the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider is set on Yamatai, an island in the Dragon's Triangle off Japan, ruled by the shamaness queen Himiko. Lara becomes a hardened survivor, scrounging up resources and her own grit to fight against a death cult keeping her on the island. She returns to Yamatai in the 2014 Dark Horse Comics series, albeit reluctantly. The 2018 film that's based on 2013 also features Yamatai, but with significant plot differences to the game.
Although seaweed is not a collectible resource in Tomb Raider, it's reasonable to imagine Lara consuming it at some point during her adventure on Yamatai. Seaweed is an environmental feature in a lot of the explored ruins in the franchise. In The Last Revelation, a younger Lara quips that she found "Your average priceless seaweed" while exploring Cambodia with her mentor, Werner Von Croy.
This recipe comes together in a cinch. All you do is soak your seaweed sheets for 10 minutes, mix up a dressing, chop up a few scallions/green/spring onions, mix them and you're done. I got a package of 10 seaweed sheets. The one ingredient I had to substitute, by my own fault, was rice vinegar. I didn't quite have a tablespoon left of that and had to sub the rest with white wine vinegar. It was close enough.
Since the Seaweed Salad wasn't enough of a meal on its own, I also made a Dumpling Bake from Takes Two Eggs as the main course. It's a lovely dish with frozen dumplings (I used pork and vegetable), a red curry coconut sauce, and torn and chopped bok choy.
If you want to make this recipe for Seaweed Salad yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide. The recipe I used for the Dumpling Bake can be found here.
