Friends, do you find yourself missing popcorn now that movie theaters have gone dark? Pine no more. Using this very simple recipe from Mark Bittman’s Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, you can have this fragrant treat whenever you like.
You’ll need a brown paper lunch bag (the kind you’re not sending your kids or grandkids to school with right now), vegetable oil (I prefer canola) and popcorn. Bittman says it should be fresh. Mine wasn’t, but it still worked, just not so much popped as it did when it was fresh. Also Bittman says you need salt. At our house, we watch our salt intake with great care and prefer to add it sparingly after the popcorn has popped.
Okay, put 2 teaspoons of oil in the bag and add a quarter cup of popcorn. Fold the bag over twice and crimp firmly. Shake the bag to mix the corn with the oil.
Put the bag in the microwave. (Tip: I put the bag on a paper towel to keep the glass carousel from getting greasy.) Our current microwave has a popcorn setting that works to perfection. If yours doesn’t, set it on high and pop the corn for two minutes to three minutes depending on the power of your microwave. With our old microwave, closer to two minutes was best because you really don’t want to burn your popcorn. (Tip from Bittman: stop the microwave when the pops are four seconds apart.) Take the bag out promptly and empty it into a bowl. Bittman makes some suggestions for what you might add besides salt. We’re cheese freaks at our house, so we sometimes put Parmesan on our popcorn. But mostly we eat it plain with a little salt.
Enjoy!