The Weather Channel says we can expect 8 to 12 inches of snow, and that means everyone is legally compelled to rush out to the supermarket and buy every loaf of bread and gallon of milk in the place.

If you have a cow, you probably know more about milking it than I do. I suppose I could tell you how to bake bread, but I'd like to point out that there's a third food in the Blizzard Food Pyramid. That's homemade popcorn. It's nice to have bread and milk in the house in case you get snowbound, but this is really a good time for getting out the coal-oil lanterns in case the electricity goes out, playing old songs on the phonograph until it does go out, and setting up the card table to put together a jigsaw puzzle, while munching on freshly-popped corn.

A Pox On Microwave Popcorn!

Thirty or forty years ago, they made popcorn poppers that were standard items in every dorm room, partly because they were allowed and other cooking appliances weren't. Sometimes, they were used to heat up canned soup, and sometimes, they were used to fry eggs, or to cook other items, college students being a lot better at ingenuity than they are at studying. However, they weren't half-bad at making popcorn, either.

Then air poppers came along, and everybody thought they were great, because they didn't use oil. They never burned the corn, and they didn't need much cleanup. However, they had one big flaw. The popcorn was terrible. It had no flavor, and because the popcorn wasn't oily, salt wouldn't stick to it. Some popcorn poppers soon appeared that allowed you to drip melting butter on the corn, but that would soon melt the plastic parts of the popper, and make it look disgusting.

The next step was microwave popcorn. Just sticking popcorn by itself in the microwave didn't work very well, but oil soaks up the microwaves and pops the corn. The problem with microwave popcorn was that the bags were large enough that they wouldn't turn on the carousel, resulting in hotspots that burned the popcorn, and the bags trapped the moisture of the exploding kernels.

Popcorn pops because the moisture in the kernel turns into steam, exploding the kernel. In a standard corn popper, this moisture quickly escapes, but in a microwave popcorn bag, the steam remains in the bag. The first kernels to pop are thus steamed as the later kernels pop, and the later kernels don't pop so well because the steam build up pressure. The combination of tough kernels from the steaming and the burnt taste from hotspots makes microwave popcorn less than wonderful.

Moviehouse Popcorn

You could buy a popcorn popper like they have in movie houses. They make good popcorn, especially if they are kept clean, but movie houses tend to soak popcorn in immense quantities some sort of yellow-orange industrial waste that is mislabeled "butter", and they salt their popcorn as if they were being paid by the pound of salt used. And actually, they are. They make a good profit on the popcorn, then sell you a half-gallon size cup of Coke for $4.50 to rinse the salt out of your mouth.

The good thing is, you can make great popcorn at home, as good as the stuff that they offered in movie houses when admission was 35c, as good as the stuff they sold in the G. C. Murphy store downtown, as good as the stuff they had at the county fair when Jasper was a pup.

But you need the right pan. I've been grousing for the better part of a decade because Blondie insisted on getting a stove with a glass cooktop. In order to make good popcorn, you need a heavy pan that you can slide back and forth on the burner. If you're not careful, you can scratch a glass cooktop that way, and scratching glass that gets heated over and over again probably isn't a very inexpensive thing to do.

A Dutch Oven

I recently found the answer, though, at WalMart. I have been wanting a cast-iron dutch oven for a long time, and Blondie kept insisting that we had a green dutch oven in the basement. As best I remember, it was a sad thing made of stamped metal, and it got discarded when we moved into this house. I finally demanded that Blondie find the dutch oven in the basement, because I'd looked and looked and looked, and it wasn't there. She finally gave up, and agreed not to come at me with a golf club if I brought home a new dutch oven.

Of course, being the cheapskate that I am, I'd already looked at Ollie's regularly for years, and when Odd Lots opened, I checked there, too. They didn't have any, and that meant the cheapest price was going to be at WalMart. Ouch. Their price for a cast iron dutch ovens, I knew, was well over $50. I don't like shopping at WalMart anyhow. However, when I got there, I found a caldero right near the dutch ovens that appeared to fit my requirements.

A Caldero, Actually

I didn't know what a caldero was before that. It's a Spanish rice cooker, shaped somewhat like a dutch oven, with a tight lid like a dutch oven, but the bottom corners are rounded instead of being squared. The caldero at WalMart was $23, and it was made of black anodized aluminum, with a glass lid. And the bottom was really smooth and flat.

It's a little smaller than the $65 6-quart Lodge cast iron dutch oven. It also weighs 3 pounds instead of 16, which is nice for my arthritic wrists. I was regretting my actions all the way to the cash register, though, because I keep finding that it's better to buy what I want in the first place, than to waste my money on inadequate substitutes. As much as it pains me to part with $65, I would only have to do that once, but ruined food is an ongoing expense. I simply cannot afford to cheap out; it is too expensive.

But when I got home and washed the pan, I started to feel better about it, and I decided to give it a really rigorous test. I scooped out a gob of lard, and put it in the bottom of the pan, and turned the burner on high. When the stuff melted, it was a circle about 8" or 9" in diameter. The fat beaded up on the anodized aluminum surface, which was promising. I grabbed the scoop out of the sugar cannister, and poured a quarter cup of sugar into the center of that shimmering hot oil, then started stirring with a heat-resistant rubber spatula. (They have some of them left at Ollie's, Paula Deen brand, really nice thick handles, for about $4 for a card of two, one slightly larger than the other. Recommended. Or they have them at the Restaurant Store, on Old Philadelphia Pike, which has lots of other neat stuff for cooking, and you don't have to be a restaurateur to buy there.)

Carmelization Is Next

Once the sugar started to turn liquid, I grabbed the popcorn, and poured enough popcorn to make a single layer maybe 6" or 7" in diameter. (Obviously, I had to keep stirring to get the popcorn to lay down in a single layer so I could see how much I had.) I kept stirring until the corn started to pop, then added the lid. Then I grabbed the two ears of the caldero with hot pads, a thumb of each hand holding the lid on, and started to shake the pan on the burner as the corn popped. Once the corn was about 2" deep in the pan, I took the lid off, and started stirring with the spatula again.

When the popcorn stops popping, you want to remove it from the heat as quickly as possible. In theory, you should turn it out on yesterday's newspaper. Make sure you have enough newspaper, because you might end up with hot lard soaking right through to the countertop, and that wouldn't be good. I didn't plan far enough ahead, and the only newspaper was upstairs, so I plopped the caldero on a wooden cutting board, and kept stirring like mad.

Also in theory, you should salt the popcorn at this point. I forgot to. It can be added later, but it seems to stick better if you do it right away. It's been ten years since I did this, and I was slow to add the popcorn to the pan, and the sugar carmelized a bit too much. That actually gives you a bit of extra flavor, but it's not as sweet. Blondie ended up adding some more sugar to hers.

I've since made more kettle corn, correcting these errors, and Blondie has decided that I'm so good at it that she need not learn how to do this. That sounds to me like I've made another error. What's more, the next day when I went to make a batch of regular popcorn, I found the caldero was full of soup. Blondie has decided that it's wonderful for soups and stews. It probably would work well as a chicken fryer, too, except that the darned thing is always in use.

And Regular Popcorn

Tonight, I made regular popcorn. I omitted the part about adding sugar, and instead added a half-stick of butter when there was about a single layer of popped corn in the pan. The butter was cold from the refrigerator - a mistake I'll not make again - and the fat cooled down enough that the popping stopped for a moment. It soon started again, though, and Blondie proclaimed tonight that it was the best popcorn she'd ever had, ever.

It was good, yes, and maybe it was the best she'd ever had, but somehow, I think she wants something. Maybe she thinks Santa Claus is watching?

In any case, it looks like we'll wake in the morning to a nice snowfall. We have a fresh loaf of Italian bread from Alfred and Sam's, and some homemade vegetable soup in the refrigerator, and a gallon of raw milk from the farm. Now, if we just had a card table, and a good jigsaw puzzle, we'd be all set.

On Deck: Italian Dressing Mix

We also have some homemade Italian dressing mix, as good as, or perhaps a tad better than, the stuff that Good Seasons sells at 3 envelopes for $4. You know, a Mason jelly-jar of that mix, the equivalent of 32 envelopes, would make a very nice Christmas present. Add a stainless steel coffee scoop (you use one one scoop of mix per cruet), and your cost is under $10, but it's worth $35 or $40. If you want to go a little further, you could include a nice cruet, a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil and an interesting bottle of vinegar, or a set of wooden salad bowls, but the mix is the belle of the ball. I'll share the recipe for the salad dressing mix next time around.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
blizzard - caldero - G. C. Murphy - kettle corn - popcorn - popcorn poppers - WalMart