Cooking. And Popcorn.

I’m so glad to be cooking again. I love food. I thoroughly enjoy learning about food, eating creative food, learning to cook from scratch, experimenting with ethic foods, spices, techniques, ingredients, you name it. But as happened with all of my interests, it left me last fall after the move. But, I’m happy to report, it recently found its way home.

To say I haven’t been cooking isn’t to say I haven’t cooked. I have. I have to. I mean, there is only so much shwarma and chicken house and chicken mejboos my dude can handle. But my interest in the creative and wonderful side of cooking had left. Only the utility part remained. And the utility part is not the part I’m the biggest fan of.

But some time after the six-month mark, some big things seemed to settle in to place, and their settling made room for my fun old friend. I don’t have anything earth shattering to report just yet. I haven’t wrung a chicken or hacked up a goat or put any whole cardamom in my Indian food, but I’ve pulled out some old recipes and enjoyed making  and sharing them. And I’ve tried a few new recipes, some of which have even become regulars (Dal!). And I’m back in the experimenting mode again where I think of things I want to try and just do them. A few months ago any similar effort just felt like too much. I just couldn’t find the energy. But now I’m back to things like this – deciding I want to make popcorn for a group, from scratch.

If you’ve ever made popcorn from scratch, you know that it is very easy.   But if you’ve never made popcorn from scratch (as was the case with me several years ago), it seems daunting enough to continue paying for overpriced sub-par microwave popcorn. (There is, of course, nothing wrong with microwave popcorn. There are many situations where having a hot snack waiting on you with no mess and no minutes lost may be just what you need. But once you know how, stove-top popcorn is almost as easy, MUCH better tasting, and remarkably inexpensive.)

Looking back, I shouldn’t have been intimidated by scaling my popcorn instructions for a group. But prior to last week I had never made more than the Everyday Food measured amount, which means I’d always used the same trusty non-stick saucepan. But to use old faithful I’d have to make several batches and I was hoping to be speedier than that. So I pulled out my honker dutch-oven and prayed for the best. Because whereas my saucepan is a nice, thick, heat distributor, I wasn’t so confident that my thinner dutch-oven was going to go even enough with the heat to prevent burning.

But it worked like a charm! I tried a new recipe from allrecipes.com, tripled it, paid close attention to the heat and shook it like crazy. I’ll have to use fewer kernels in the future because they over-popped the pot, but no worries there. And I have to say, the popping sound was incredibly fun, a bonus I didn’t expect.

If you’ve never tried the stove-top method, give it a try and let me know what you think. If you have tried it and love it, send me your tips and tricks. As I have time to try them out, I’ll try to post some flavor combinations I’m intrigued by. If you have favorite ones of those, I’d love to hear them too!