Crisp Seaweed with Peanuts

This delectable appetizer, a speciality of the coastal city of Ningbo, combines the crisp dark frizz of deep-fried seaweed with fragrant red peanuts. A sprinkling of sugar sets off the salty, umami taste of the vegetable. It's traditionally made with a kind of branched string lettuce or gutweed that grows like a carpet of strandy green hair along the shoreline near Ningbo, and has a mesmerizing fragrance and flavor. It's known as tai cai or tai tiao in Chinese, and is used in both sweet pastries and savory dishes. I've never found branched string lettuce for sale outside China, but once when I was walking along a beach in southern England I caught its unmistakable scent on the wind. I returned to London with bagfuls of seaweed, which I dried out and used in a few Ningbo dishes. If you can find clean, wild branched string lettuce, which you will recognize from its resemblance to skeins of green hair, do dry it and use it in the following recipe. Otherwise, I offer you a favorite cheat of Chinese restaurants in the UK, which often serve "crispy seaweed" made from deep-fried cabbage leaves: delicious, and strikingly similar in effect to the original dish.