A Simple Snack Recipe: Stove-Top Popcorn

Hi, I realized a few days ago that it's been awhile since I shared any recipes with you all, so here is a quick, easy, healthy snack that we love to enjoy.
Once you make it, you may never go back to microwaved popcorn. (At least I hope so. That stuff is NOT very good for you.)

If you've ever had old fashioned, stove popped popcorn you know that it is delicious and fluffy and devoid of all of the chemical "butter" you find in microwave popcorn or that gargantuan tub of heart-attack causing movie theater popcorn.

I remember as a kid my mom making huge amounts of popcorn and then we'd salt and butter it and pour it into a paper grocery bag to take to my uncle's football games in the fall. It would be cold and windy and more often than not it would be rainy but with warm woolen blankets and salty, delicious popcorn it was well worth it to sit for a few hours and watch him play until our fingers got numb and our noses got red and my brother and I nearly fell asleep, then we'd head for our nice cozy home and fall into our toasty warm beds.

I love making popcorn for our kids, and they love to help. It's so much fun for them to pick out a few yellow kernels and drop them into the sizzling oil, then when it pops they make a game out of trying to catch the kernels as they pop out, sometimes onto the kitchen floor. ;)

Here's how we make our stove-top popcorn: it's super easy, I don't even measure!


You need:

~A big pot with a lid, preferably a heavy-bottomed one so that the heat is distributed evenly across the pan.
~Oil of some kind. I usually use olive oil because it's healthier than canola and gives the popcorn a nicer flavor.
~Popcorn, of course! If you can, get the organic kind because the regular kind is almost certainly genetically modified. We go back and forth between organic and regular, depending on how much money we have that month.
~Salt or topping of your choice
~A big bowl


The How To:

Put your pan on the stove, turn it up to the highest heat setting and pour enough oil in to cover the bottom of the pan.

Take two or three or four kernels and drop them into the pan. This is a good place for your kids to help, because the oil isn't hot enough yet to burn them.

Leave the lid off, and wait for those kernels to pop.

When they pop, your oil is hot!

I made a mistake here, and put the lid on too early. When I poured in all the rest of the popcorn, it took too long to pop because the pan had to heat back up and I ended up burning a bit of popcorn and not all the kernels popped. So leave the lid off when you put the first few kernels in, so your pan can get really hot!!

Dump in enough popcorn to cover the bottom of the pan, put the lid on (quickly!) and let them pop away!

Shake the pan back and forth on the burner a few times, so that the popped popcorn doesn't burn while the rest of the kernels are still popping.

When the popping slows down to just a few pops here and there (or when you smell it starting to burn!), turn off the heat and leave the lid on for a few more seconds to give those last few kernels a chance to pop and then pour your nice hot popcorn into a big bowl and salt it up and enjoy!

We don't use butter on our popcorn, with the olive oil you don't really have to. It leaves the popcorn nice and flavorful without the extra saturated fat that butter gives you.
 You can sprinkle other toppings on as well, like nutritional yeast for a healthy but cheesy flavor, or cinnamon and sugar for a "dessert" popcorn or whatever else you like. We're boring and just do salt. ;)



This is shared at Frugally Sustainable's Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways. Hop on over and check out the hundred plus other awesome bloggers who've shared cool stuff about homesteading, frugal living and real food cooking!