Recipe: Crispix Arare - Sweet And Savory Snack Mix

"Are you quitting?" my colleague, desk neighbor and fellow snack hoarder, Abby Reisner, asked after I snuck up on her at the office, cradling a quart container of my mom's Crispix arare.

It's a logical response. Let me explain: Back in the day, when my food magazine internships would end, I would spend the night before baking batches of the corn- and rice-spliced cereal, gingerly coating the kernels with a shoyu-laced syrup and tons of furikake (the sesame seed and nori kind, not the fishy ones). Then I would bundle them in little bags and bashfully make my way to all the editors I worked with (read: idolized) to give them the goods.

I tried baking chocolate chip cookies instead once, but I freaked out mid-oven sesh, and they ended up way overdone. So that's why I eventually went with arare, a Japanese word that translates to "snow pellets" and refers to rice cracker snack mixes. It became sort of a catchall for Japanese snacks for me at home growing up in Southern California.

This recipe is minimal compared to others—no nuts, Bugles or Honeycomb—just like my mom likes it. She took it from the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Community Center's cookbook, compiled by the Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) to raise money for the organization. "That generation were all wives of farmers. They cooked and didn't go out to eat," she told me over the phone. "I bought it because they have nice recipes that they're trying to carry on from generation to generation."

She made it for road trips, church gatherings at our home or just because. And after shyly sharing this mix with my coworkers and watching them eat handful after handful, only stopping themselves to make sure we had enough to shoot a photo, I realized I should do the same. Arare can be for all the time, not just goodbyes.

Recipe adapted from Debi Inamine