A couple of months ago, my friend Michele shared with me a jar of the ingredients for this recipe. This is just the most recent recipe she’s shared with me — there have been quite a few over the years, and all of them have been fantastic.

Since receiving this most recent gift, I’ve gathered together my own little permanent collection of seeds and I’ve made the recipe probably half a dozen times already. Now that I have everything I need, I can throw together the recipe and get it into the oven in a very short time. As Michele emphasized to me, it is an extremely forgiving recipe. I’ve tried it with the addition of an herb mixture in place of black pepper, without the sesame seeds once (guest’s allergen issue), with flax seeds sometimes and flax meal other times. It always comes out great no matter what. If you decide to share a jar of ingredients with a friend, do what Michele did: Add the flax and chia to a cupcake liner, and lay it on top of the other dry ingredients. Then print out this recipe and tape it to the jar.

These crackers are delicious plain, but I’ve also eaten them along with hummus, cheese, soup, scrambled eggs, a bowl of salad, and any other way you can think of to enjoy crackers. Believe it or not, each batch makes approximately one hundred one-inch-by-one-inch crackers. But that doesn’t mean they will last long. They won’t.

#1
1/4 cup flaxseeds (optional: blended into meal)
1/4 cup chia seeds
1 tsp. Kosher salt
1 Tbsp. garlic powder
2 tsp. black pepper
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 cup hot water

#2
1/4 cup hemp seeds
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds

1) Preheat oven to 350F. Cover a cookie sheet in parchment paper and set aside.

2) Blend together the flax meal, chia seeds, and spices with the hot water and olive oil in a medium-sized mixing bowl. Allow to rest 10 minutes.

3) Add hemp, sunflower, sesame, and pumpkin seeds to the mixing bowl. Stir well. The mixture will stick together, slightly more solid than liquid.

4) Pour the mixture onto the prepared cookie sheet, and use a spatula to spread it all the way out toward the edges while keeping the batter continuous (without holes). Sprinkle the tops of the crackers with a little more coarse salt at this point if you like.

5) Bake 25-30 minutes until beginning to turn golden, remove from oven and score into squares. Return to oven, turn off heat, and allow to cool in the oven. They will become crisp as they cool.