Microwave popcorn. Make your OWN microwave bagged popcorn, 3 minutes to glory! Cheap, easy and the kids can do it! It's a short post, I was too busy eating popcorn

I love popcorn. I love popcorn.  I love popcorn.  I have tried the flavors but nope, I'm a true salt and butter popcorn gal.  I have all the popcorn gadgets.

I have the Whirly Pop for fabulous retro popcorn.  I have the standard deep pot with a lid and oil for my teenaged version of popcorn. I (used to) buy microwave bagged popcorn for the convenience, ease and deliciousness.  I like PopSecret Butter Flavor, yeah, that's my secret guilty pleasure.  I have a hot air popper which is fabulous and we use it whenever there's a teenaged crowd of gamers in my house.

When it's just me, or just kiddo and I want a single bag of microwave, no fuss, no muss, no mess popcorn do I reach for a $$$ box of brand name microwave stuff?  OH NO, I reach for my $.50 pile of 50 brown, flatbottom, lunch bags and a 1/2 cup of the loose popcorn I buy at $.75/bag.  That's a lot of microwave bags of popcorn for free, c'mon, that's free.

Don't blink, this goes fast:

Grasp your packet of lunch bags, place within it 1/2 cup of the cheap stuff popcorn kernels.  Double fold the top and pop it into the microwave
   
Set timer for THREE minutes... stand there and watch it.  When the popping slows, stop it.  Seriously, no oil, no fat (yet) and hardly any steam when you open it so no risk to short kid-like people making their own.
   
Salt at will, flavor at will.  Connor likes some Parmesan cheese on his sometimes.  Add butter if you must, oh and you MUST, and look!  PERFECT popcorn, light, crunchy and crispy and completely non greasy (except for the butter)  Perfect every time.

OH and if you do add butter and it seeps through the bag, just pop the whole popcorn bag into a Ziploc bag or dump it into another bowl.

IF you have some time, you can prefill the brown bags with the right amount of popcorn, and keep them ready for anyone to grab and nuke.  You can write the instructions on the outside of the bags if you want to remind kids or anyone else how long to cook and remember to tell them to pull when the popping stops even if it's less than 3 minutes.

This is Super quick, super easy, super delicious and one of my (many) quickie secret pleasures.

Go make some cheap cheap easy popcorn

/enjoy

I try really really hard to think popcorn is health food

I'm home today and supposed to be doing other things but I don't want to. I'm also hungry which, as we well know, is not conducive to being productive or even terribly polite to telemarketers.

There are a couple things I have as my 'go to' when a snack attack happens. Popcorn is one of those things. I've been a diehard micropop girl for a while but when I was walking through Bed Bath & Beyond last year I spied the WhirlyPop. Wow, I thought, that's retro and I think I had one in college or maybe earlier.

Flashback to popcorn in a little bowl when I was a kid, sitting on a hard plastic kitchen chair, at the front screen door, watching thunderstorms. We had gigantic, all afternoon, thunderstorms when I was a kid and we always had a snack to watch them. I used to think my mother must have cared so deeply that we be exposed to the natural world in all her glory but now that I'm a mom and as I look back, it was mother nature's DSI and I'm sure mom appreciated the babysitter.

Back to my shopping trip, I had the requisite $5.00 coupon and it was on sale so Mr. WhirlyPop came home with me.

I find I get very righteous when I have the popcorn urge, still somewhere in the back of my head I am managing to convince myself it's either health food or NOT junk food or something, whatever, it makes me happy and damnit I've lived long enough AND an interesting enough life to justify this (and anything quite frankly but that's another day)

So, the whirlypop comes out on the counter, opens it's lid - waiting.

2Tablespoons of bland oil

1/2cup of any popcorn you happen to have around get dumped in, off heat

I give it a few slow handle cranks to mix it up and pop it on mostly high heat (my recipes are hideous I know but I never pay attention)

After a minute or two, you hear the popping and stand at the stove for a whole 2 minutes, cranking the handle (so you're actually COOKING and not just NUKING something) it's all about involvement and I feel terribly involved when I crank that handle. The popping will stop and you'll open the little door and LOOK what's waiting for you!!

It's hot and dry and steamy and crunchy and popcorny. I dump it into a pretty glass bowl because I really like the look of popcorn in glass for some reason.

I season with kosher salt and a drizzle of melty butter (yes, I nuke it so the micro doesn't feel completely abandoned) and dive in... it's corn and only really a drizzle of oil so it's GOT to be healthy...doesn't it?