My latest crush

I'm in love, sort of. Or it's a crush, your call. On an inanimate object, or more accurately the product of an inanimate object; it's not so much the Presto PopLite I love so much as it's the fresh, fresh popcorn.

I got sick of the microwave stuff. So I decided to go back to the late '70s. It's a little bizarre, actually, that last part: when I decided I was going to go for real popcorn again, it was just a little strange that hot air popcorn poppers are unchanged in thirty years. Oh, I know, functionally there's no reason for them to. But just as stereo systems have gone through phases--wood veneer, silver finish, black matte, the iPod look, etc.--surely one might have expected a 21^st Century popcorn popper to, you know, have something, what? Futuristic? Contemporary? But no, no the hot air popper looks just like the one my family had when Reagan was President.

I thought about doing the oil thing. It just looked too messy. Okay, the hot air popper comes with the warning that it might eject a superhot unpopped kernel across the room, which I guess is a messiness unto itself. But it seemed easier to clean, and I'm lazy. The two or three times I've done butter (drool) I did it in the microwave so I wouldn't even have to clean the little butter-melter cup on top of the popper (as memory serves, melted butter would cool and coalesce at the 90° angle where the bottom meets the side and was impossible to ever really clean out, forming a crusty residue).

You just can't get good popcorn anymore, it seems. The movie theaters used to be the last bastion, but these days even movie popcorn seems to taste like crap. And Orson help you if you want buttered popcorn (and who doesn't): ask for "butter" and the typical theater will either squirt some sort of hot syrup on top or unhelpfully point you over to a self-serve station offering "BUTTER-FLAVORED TOPPING." Yeah, uh, yum?

But fresh popcorn? Oooooh.

The popcorn popper was around $19.⁸⁸ from Amazon. And it seems Presto is the company for this, literally: you get a Orville Redenbacher popper and apparently it's just a Presto with Orville's name on a sticker slapped on the side. Nineteen bucks is reasonable--the popcorn is priceless. I mean, it's insane how good the real stuff is.

You can get decent microwavable, sure. But even the decent stuff (like the stuff the Boy Scouts sell every year) had started to taste too chemical, I just couldn't take it.

I'm in lurf, fer sure.

And now I'm off to watch Frankenstein again, with a big bowl o' popcorn beside me. The noms you hear are coming from inside the house....