Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Protein-Packed Popcorn...

Disclaimer: If you have a weak stomach, this is probably not the post for you.

After coming back from lunch, where I was ‘hosting’ a lunchtime detention for 9th & 10th graders who, for whatever reason, decided not to do their homework last night, I was in the mood for some popcorn.

It had been a while since I’ve made popcorn at my house.  I knew that my popcorn was getting old and that I’d have to shake out the popcorn pretty well (refer to this post, if you need to jog your memory) before popping it.  I got out the colander and the popcorn and began shaking the popcorn over the sink.

Sure enough, there were quite a few dead little weevils who found their way to the bottom of my kitchen sink.  There were even several live ones – at least for a while.  I also needed to pick out quite a few kernels of corn that were way too dried out to even think about popping.  Plus, there were little holes in a lot of the popcorn, which I knew were from the weevils.  In fact, I was pretty sure that if I somehow managed to break into some of the kernels, I would find a couple of  weevils within the corn.

Even with all of this, the shaking out weevils and picking too-dried kernels out of the corn for a while, Operation Popcorn was still a “go”.  I got out my popper, a little bit of oil and the popcorn salt.  I added more popcorn than normal because I knew there would be a lot of unpopped kernels.  And there were.

Finally, though, I was sitting at the table, Kindle in hand and a bowl of popcorn in front of me. I began munching.  After a few minutes, I started wondering if there would be any now-popped weevils in the bottom of the bowl.  I stopped reading to check the bowl. There were.  But not too many.

That actually didn’t bother me too much and I continued eating.  A few more minutes went by and I started thinking about all the holes I had seen in the unpopped corn.  I inspected the popped corn a little more.  Some pieces of popcorn seemed to have dark spots on them, at the center of the kernel.  Any guesses as to what they were?

I guess a little extra protein never hurt anyone.

No comments:

Post a Comment