~Rach

 

So the Chief and I love popcorn, and we find it’s a very affordable snack for our big family. But we have always hankered after that magical, salty-buttery taste that movie theater popcorn has. There are a few factors that go into making the very best movie theater popcorn.

 

First Variable: What Kind of Popper Should I Use

 

The healthiest popcorn is made in an air popper They are cheap and very easy to use, and I used one for years. They look like this:

 

 

…and you dump a handful of kernels into the slot, put a bowl in front of the chute, plug it in, and watch the magic. They are a lot of fun. Add a little salt and they are the cheapest way to make popcorn, too.

 

Does the scoopy thingy up top work to melt butter? Thank you for asking. It does not.

 

Another fun way to make popcorn is in a Whirley Pop Popcorn maker. They sit on a stove eye, you dump a little butter in, and churn the crank to stir the kernels. This is fairly cheap and it can make delicious movie theater popcorn. It is also a LOT of work.

 

For $10 more, I prefer this kind:

 

The Stir Crazy 

The Stir Crazy takes oil in its base and will stir your popcorn for you. Totally worth the extra ten bucks.

You can also just use oil in a sauce pan and stir it constantly, but for me the guess work of getting it the right temperature and the constant stirring would have me making popcorn less.

 
Second Variable: What Kind of Oil to Use?

First, let me save you some heartache. Do not use butter or margarine in your popcorn maker. Movie theaters do not make it that way, and if you do, you can burn out your popcorn maker. Yep, I’m saying that from experience.

You can use any good vegetable oil for your popcorn, but we have had a slightly better experience with coconut oil. Coconut oil doesn’t lend any taste to the popcorn. It is light and clear. For our ideal popcorn, we use two tablespoons of solid coconut oil.

When we run out of coconut oil, we use canola oil.

Last Variable: Seasoning (Movie Theater Popcorn, the secret ingredient)

In our research, we discovered that there is a salt you can buy for popcorn that makes it taste exactly like movie theater popcorn. The salt is called Flavacol. You can buy Flavacol right off Amazon, or you can look for it at your local restaurant supply store. For us it was a little cheaper locally.

The process:

We melt two tablespoons of coconut oil in our popcorn popper.

Once the oil is hot, we add a cup of kernels to the popper – we don’t have a favorite kind of kernels right now. We’re just buying cheap store brand corn. I’ll update this later if that changes.

Sprinkle 1-2 teaspoons of Flavacol right over the kernels.

Wait for your corn to pop.

If you love movie theater popcorn, you will never go back to cooking it any other way. Enjoy!

p.s. There is also a glaze you can buy to make kettle corn at home. It cooks right in the machine just like the Flavacol. The kids love it!

p.p.s. There are affiliate links to Amazon in this article. Thank you for your support!

I passed around a quotes on Facebook about how your mother is always with you in certain things, even when you don’t have her any more. It was a beautiful quote, but I realized that the quote spoke to me, but only on the edges of it. The truth is, there are very real places in my heart where my mother will always live. Fortuitously, I still have my mother so I got to share them with her. So here they are – the 25 places where my mom will always live:

25 Places Where My Mother Will Always Live

1. Dusty treasures in dimly-lit thrift stores
2. Yellow-edged paper backs
3. The Secret of Roan Inish while folding laundry
4. Anne of Green Gables
5. Learning Spanish together just for fun.
6. Walking about the lake at Bob Woodruff Park
7. Making stories about the geese
8. Watership Down
9. The Pine smell of the cabins
10. Making stories about if we lived on an island and had to survive
11. Cats
12. Newts
13. Flipping through the Childcraft books
14. Go, Dog, Go
15. CInnamon rolls and stockings on Christmas morning
16. Birthdays with always just the right book
17. Pink cake with blue frosting
18. Blue cake with pink frosting
19. Puff painted denim jacket
20. Queen Anne’s Lace
21. Dramatic Movie Soundtracks
22. West Side Story & The Sound of Music
23. Paper Dolls & Post Cards
24. Dreaming about moving to India
25. Puffed Sleeves

Thank you, mom, for the happy childhood 🙂

So, this happened.

It was, like, two weeks ago now, so I think I can safely write about it without any danger of accidentally falling into relevance or generating traffic to the site from people who want to talk about it because it’s so fresh and exciting.

I have to admit that I watched it like five times, so of those 72 million views it’s garnered so far, at least five of them are mine.

It wasn’t until the second day that everybody found out it was a clothing commercial and got all scandalized that someone would make art for the sake of making money.

Making art for the sake of making money doesn’t bother me. If it did, I wouldn’t be attempting to write the next great Young Adult Post-Apocalyptic SciFi Romantic Dystopian Mystery story. I’d just lie in bed and dream about Lux and Summer and Lina and the boys.

Asking strangers to kiss for the sake of making art, that bothers me. Have to think a lot about why, though. Not sure I will get to it in the blog post.

Kisses are supposed to mean something.

If you don’t believe in meaning and reason and poetry and stuff, then feel free to disagree with me. If you think that kisses are part of natural selection, and that they were never anything more than an extra motivation to reproduce our species, then maybe it doesn’t matter. If you think that meaning itself is an illusion, than it really doesn’t matter.

I heard a theory once, that kissing was invented by breastfeeding mothers way back in our temporal history. If the mothers kiss their babies, then take in any inhabiting bacteria, they can develop the leukocytes that baby needs and pass them along in breast milk. A beautiful symbiosis. I wonder how long something like that would take to evolve. Would it be a biological tendency or would it be a sociological trend?

No idea.

But if you think that’s all kissing is, well, like I said, it doesn’t really matter, does it? When you watch this video, you will feel a pleasant rush of chemical reactions. They will probably make you smile. If you’re anything like me, you’ll start to project. You’ll think about how sweet it would be if something of them got married and raised families and told their children they just knew from that moment.

But, you know, sometimes, they don’t.

I had this boyfriend in high school. He was – well, he was my first great love. I worshiped him. No, really, I did. If he liked something, I tried really hard to like it, too, and if I couldn’t manage, then I just liked that he liked it. I found all the thinks about us that were the same and I made those the only important thinks about me and who I was. And if he wanted me to do something, I wanted to want me to do it, too.

I as much as told him that, one day. I told him that I was glad he didn’t push me into doing things I didn’t want to do, because if he did, I would follow him.

And it didn’t take very long until he did.

The way he got me to do things I didn’t want to do was this: he would push me gently.

And when I said no, he would completely emotionally withdraw. He would emotionally abandon me, and he would say it was his fault, but I knew that it was mine.

Because he would do it again the next time.

And when I did go along with what he wanted to do – eventually, even on my own initiative because I wanted him to love me so badly – he would tell me that it was Very, Very Good because everything we did together wasn’t like the common things other people did. The things we did together Meant Something.

I think, I honestly think, that he thought he was telling the truth. I’m not angry at him anymore. He asked for my forgiveness, and I forgave him.

But what he said back then was a lie, you see, because he was Doing Things with other people, too.

After he left me, all those beautiful things that I felt meant something, were like dust and ashes to me. The funny thing about living in the fourth dimension is that although we think the past is safe because we can’t see it anymore, it’s not. Something in now can affect things in the past. If someone says ‘I love you’, it feels beautiful no matter what, but if you find out that the person was lying or manipulating you, or that they were just saying the words to accomplish another end, whatever that end is, the moment turns into dust. It’s nothing. It has no meaning.

But at the same times, the simplest things can be gilded by what happens in the future.

I met my husband in school. We were both new kids in our last year of high school. We didn’t start dating until the end of the year, and we were only on the borders of each other’s circles. We didn’t talk.

But we did sit next to each other in first period. I had German class. He had Spanish. We wore headphones and spoke into microphones. We were about four inches apart.

One day, during class, our shoulders touched.

The Chief doesn’t remember. My theory is that he just didn’t notice, because he was very, very tired – he worked a night shift at McDonalds too pay his tuition.

But I noticed.

And I didn’t move my shoulder. We sat like that for the whole period.

It felt nice.

It didn’t mean anything then. But now, after being together for fourteen years, after raising four gorgeous children, after putting up with unbelievable amounts of crap from each other, I look back on that day and remember – that was the first time I touched the man who I would spend the next decade and a half with. The moment has magic for me. I will never forget it.

Point?

If you want to make art about kisses that don’t mean anything, feel free. One of the great things about being alive in the First World in 2014. We can make whatever art we want as long as we don’t hurt someone else in the process. To me, though, all kisses are not alike. They look alike, they make you feel alike. But the real meaning of a kiss is not in the delicious newness, in the rush of emotions that flood over us for the first time, but in the impact it leaves on the whole of a life.

Sound cheesy? Oh, have we not met yet?

I’m Rach. I’m cheesy and romantic.

Hi. 🙂