A Dangerous Discovery

When my children got home from their trip to Arizona to visit family, they presented me with a bag of kettle corn my mom had sent home for me.

I love kettle corn. Like, a lot. It checks all the salt/fat/sweet boxes that make something taste good to me.

I did send a jar of it with each of the younger two children to be their school snacks a couple of days, but then I ate the rest of the bag all by myself. Which is what I do when given access to kettle corn.

Popcorn, however, is a pretty healthy snack all in all, and I thought maybe I could make something like kettle corn that would satisfy my desire to eat something sweet without going overboard on the sugar.

I make popcorn on the stove in a big saucepan. Typically, I pop the popcorn in the pan, dump it into a bowl, and then put the butter right in the very hot pan to melt before drizzling that over the popcorn and then salting it. 

To make something like kettle corn, I figured I could just add my very dark maple syrup to the pan before the butter, and the maple syrup would quickly release most of its water content on contact with the hot pan. Then I could add the butter, etc.

That is what I did, and it did indeed work quite well.

But then, of course, I had kettle corn. A lightly buttered and sweetened kettle corn, to be sure, but still the salt/fat/sweet popcorn that is so hard for me to stop eating.

I fear I did not. I managed to put a few cups in a jar for one child's snack. But I, um, ate the rest of the batch. It was like five cups of kettle corn. 

The only survivors.

So I will not be making it again unless all of my children are home to eat it before I do, but now you know: Homemade kettle corn is easy. And addictive.