Homegrown Popcorn

We just love popcorn in our house, especially when you pop it yourself in a pan and use a little butter to flavor it. Not imitation butter or margarine, or the imitation flakes. Not microwave popcorn that leaves a layer of partially hydrogenated oil as a coating in your mouth, but home popped popcorn!

It is one of Chris' favorite snacks. He might say he's full, but then offer him some popcorn, and he has yet to refuse. I make it when we go to the movies, and sneak it in. Not only because I'm too cheap to pay $5 or $6 for a bucket of popcorn, but because it tastes better than what is offered at the theaters. We have modified our butter to only a little butter and we mix it with olive oil, which is actually good for you, so now its "healthy" popcorn!

One of my recurring fun memories of childhood is when Gramps decided to try to grow popcorn one year. I might get part of this story wrong, because the memories of a child sometimes do that, but I only remember him planting the popcorn one year. I think it had to do with the fact that corn cross-pollinates, and he didn't want the hassle of the cross pollination between the popcorn with pretty much everything else. He had field corn for the pigs and chickens, and he planted a lot of white and yellow corn for all of us kids and his kids and company and for canning, and such. The popcorn would then be no good at all, and it would alter the quality of the other kinds we liked so much.

Picture and more info found here.


After the popcorn ears were ready to be harvested, we pulled them off the corn stalks and started to process them. I don't remember if we had to let them sit awhile, or if they were already hard on the corn stalk. I think they were hard. We then shucked the corn and put all the ears in bushel baskets. Mom got a few bushels for us to process at our house, and we helped Grandma do hers. I do remember getting blisters that sometimes popped, because we had to use our thumbs, fingers and hands to pop off the kernels. Then, we had to pluck out any that were not good, may have had a worm in it, or the like. We packaged the shelled popcorn and put it in containers in the freezer. Even the kernels were small, they popped really big popcorn.

It was interesting to find out that the oldest known fossilized popcorn kernels date back 80,000 years from a buried city in Mexico City.

Really good/fun recipe for popcorn balls, made with marshmallows, I've yet to see a kid who didn't like this one, given to me years ago by a friend:

POPCORN BALLS -- 1X and 3X

1/3 cup unpopped popcorn -- 1 cup unpopped corn
2 tsp olive oil -- 6 tsp olive oil
3 cups miniature marshmallows -- 9 cups miniature marshmallows
2 tsp butter -- 6 tsp butter

Pop the popcorn with the olive oil. Melt butter in a separate pan and add marshmallows, stir until all melted together, stirring constantly. Pour marshmallow mixture over popped corn, stirring gently. Coat hands with oil or butter, and shape popcorn mixture into balls.