Hot Buttered Popcorn

My secret pleasure is to pop a ginormous bowl of popcorn and scuttle away to some quiet room with a book.

This used to be quick and simple to do. That is, until the hot-air popper that has been with me since the mid-eighties finally bought the biscuit and moved on to appliance heaven.

I attempted the hot-air popper we recieved as a gift a couple years back, but these modern day devices just don't cut it. When I pop some corn, I expect to fill a bucket. The best the new device can do is produce a cup's worth before shutting itself down.

Microwave popcorn won't do either. At ten times the cost, it takes me three packages of the stuff to get a decent sized serving.

I've currently settled on the stove-top method, using a stock pot and a goodly sized helping of butter. Popping corn on the stove is an art. There's a fine line between a nice pot full of hot buttered popcorn and a pot with a chunk of smoking carbon weilded to the bottom. I'm finally getting the knack of it, but find the amount of unpopped kernals to be far out of proportion from what I could achieve with my original hot-air popper.

Fortunately, teams of scientists appear to be working on this unpopped kernal problem for me. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they engineer the ultimate poppable kernal. Unless one of them is hard of hearing, in which case we may end up with a corn monster ravaging the Iowa country side, bullets and missiles uselessly bouncing off of its ultimate, unstoppable kernals.