[caption id="attachment_1177" align="alignleft" width="319" caption="My younger sister, circa 1996."][/caption]
This Wednesday was National Popcorn Day. Yes, I seemed to miss the parade too. We ate gallons of air popped popcorn growing up. And later in the 80s, I quite willingly made the transition to the ballooning bags in the microwave. Then on August 14, 2003 my popcorn life was changed forever. That day was the massive blackout across most of the northeast. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and working in Times Square. With every form of public, and private, transportation debilitated, I walked to a friends apartment (in flip flops) thirty blocks south. I spent the night there, before walking across the Brooklyn Bridge (ah-hem, flip flops) the next morning. With no electricity, we scrounged up a pretty great eight-hour happy hour in their courtyard, subsisting mostly on popcorn popped on their gas stove. If you haven't made it before, RUN (ideally not in flip flops) to your stove and whip up a batch of anti-microwave popcorn. The instructions are below. A bag of kernels yeilds so much more, costing so much less, than a box of three microwave bags. And you get to control the flavor, fat, salt, and freshness of the whole production. (psssst...a lot less packaging and waste for the planet too!) Look for popcorn kernels at your farmer's markets as well! A great, whole food, snack that you can easily replenish again and again on game day. And coming up next is the main attraction: DIY Flavored Salts!
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"A truly good meal depends on a cavalcade of sound judgments, many of which occur well before you lift a knife. When you decide what to cook, you are deciding whether a meal can be really good or not. If you choose to do a dish you can't get good ingredients for, one you are completely unfamiliar with, or one you don't have the time or proper equipment to prepare, you may be setting the stage for a mediocre meal that will be no fun to produce. Even if you have made a dish before, or at least eaten a delicious version of it, and you have the right equipment, the best recipe can only "doll up" mediocre product. The process of deciding what to cook should always begin with deciding where to shop and what to buy (or if you are lucky, what to harvest). Only then should you settle on the preparation, which should suit the qualities of those ingredients, as well as your experience, time frame, and equipment. I add a premium for choosing a dish that suits the weather. To assess and balance these things well is no mean accomplishment, and a good sense of what to buy and how to use it is not developed overnight. Such skills are, however, a pleasure to acquire."
-Judy Rogers, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook | ||||||||||||||||
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Catie Baumer Schwalb is a chef, food writer and photographer, who splits her life between the city and the country. Not too long ago Catie was a New York City based actress and playwright for more than a decade. She has her Master of Fine Arts from the National Theater Conservatory, and her Grand Diplôme in classic culinary arts from the French Culinary Institute in New York City.
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