We had a bunch of people stay at our place for the rally for sanity/and or fear, and from one of these folks, J. learned of a wonderful and magical trick you can use at home - for popcorn!
I have a special relationship with popcorn: a love relationship. And actually, whenever J. goes out of town, its on. However, when you buy one of those popcorn boxes, with the some ridiculously small # of popcorn bags in it - is it really three? Geez, thats tiny. Anyhow, whatever number it is, clearly they have no idea how much popcorn I'm able to consume. Case in point - last night: the equivalent of four bags. (I think...maybe it was just three - it was my dinner - as if that somehow excuses my behavior). So popcorn never lasts around our house. Pretty much if it exists, I eat it and then we don't have it for a long time because I try to limit my purchases of irresistible (chocolate chips) things.
So you know how the popcorn is in a papery type bag? Well, guess what, you can just put the same amount of unpopped corn into any old regular brown paper bag and achieve the same results! Seriously! Its that easy!
"Recipe"
1/4 cup popcorn kernels
place popcorn kernels in a brown paper bag, and fold the top down. Place it in the microwave so that the folded part is facing down and will be held down by the weight of the bag. Press the popcorn button on your microwave, for a 3.5 oz bag. About 2 minutes. Actually, with our microwave I found 2 mins or 2 mins 5 seconds is best. 2 mins 10 seconds is the timing for our microwave's popcorn button but I find that some of the kernels get a little burnt that way. Actually, you have to choose between either a decent quantity of unpopped kernels or some burnt kernels. I choose the former.
The great thing? You can re-use the brown paper bag a lot of times---until it gets too many holes in it from flying popcorn hitting the sides (yes really that happens), or it gets too oily. Even dry unoiled popcorn has some natural oil on it which will eventually make your bag look oily.
This is very eco-friendly, since you can buy bulk popcorn kernels from the store (in a re-usable container!), there's no plastic around your brown paper bag, and no cardboard box every 4th bag of popcorn. The only remaining issue is who wants to eat plain popcorn?
The resolution:
Either A: Melt 1-2 tsp earth balance in a small bowl in the microwave and drizzle on top of your popcorn while kind of shaking it around and mixing it up for even coverage
or B: Spray popcorn with can of spray oil, then quickly throw some nutritional yeast and salt on it. You have to mix it around a bunch and keep spraying different layers of the popcorn with oil and adding nutritional yeast and salt. I really , really need to buy some popcorn salt. Normal salt is too big and thus...too heavy to stick nicely onto popcorn.
