A couple weeks ago I decided to buy a bag of real popcorn, not the microwaveable stuff. It has been years since I've had popcorn made in a pan with a little oil topped with just salt. Dad made popcorn a couple times, but he uses either an air popper or so little oil there's no flavor at all. And he never salted his. Microwave popcorn is… I can't even think of how to really describe it. I have been sucked into eating it since I moved here 10 yrs ago because I no longer had a popcorn popper and it's what Mr. H. ate.
But really. The more I've read about microwave popcorn and the yuck they add to it to make it acceptable tasting, the more I feel like I'm eating poison when I do eat it. (Of course I can say the same about Diet Coke, but I still have several a day.)
Anyway, yesterday I decided to pop some of the real popcorn. I had gotten Jiffy White Popcorn, put a bit of oil in the pan and added a few kernels. Put the lid on the pan and waited for those to pop 'cause then I knew the oil was hot enough. (One of many cool things about the glass lid for my sauce pan is that I could see the popcorn pop!) I threw in a few handfuls of popcorn seeds and voila! Within about a minute the lid was being pushed off the top of the pot by the fluffy kernels. 
Amazing to me, too, was how much that small bit of popcorn seeds made. This whole huge bowl full! And this is a huge bowl. Between Mr. H. and (mostly) me, we killed off nearly the whole bowl. I know, like real peanut butter, this is celestial food!
As I thought about that (and was enjoying the crunchy goodness), I realized how amazingly expensive the microwave popcorn is. This whole bowl was a few cents (and is about the same amount as two big bags of micro-pop). A big box of 10 packages of micro-pop can be on sale for around $3-4. This bag was around $3 and will make 27-5 cup servings. You do the math.
Plus the flavor is oh-so-much better. It was yummy and I'm sure I'll pull the pan out again tomorrow (or game-day Saturday).
Popcorn - it's what's for dinner!
Once I made real popcorn, I never could go back to the microwaveable stuff!
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