Popcorn for dinner

Last night I had popcorn for dinner.  For me, it's the ultimate comfort food, better than garlic mashed potatoes or macaroni and cheese.  For one thing, it has the crunch factor.  For another, you can eat a lot of it without filling up.  And, it has the salt component, which means that after I've had several bowls of popcorn, I can turn to the other comfort food:  chocolate.  And then when I'm sated with sweetness, I can go back to the popcorn.  And again.  And again.

When I was in college, my room-mate would come home and find me gorging on cashews and M&Ms, alternately.  She'd sigh and say, "What's wrong now?"  The salt-sweet combo was my antidote to a bad day.  As a grown (one might say overgrown) woman, I should be past such binges.  One would think I could handle setbacks or exhausting days in a more mature or productive manner.

But, I actually look forward to a dinner of popcorn.   I plan it out, as I am driving home, preparing my response to D's contempt (a meal is supposed to have meat and veggies.)  In point of fact, I am convinced that it is a viable alternative to cooking a "real" meal.  I start with a large kettle and begin heating the canola oil.  The garlic (yes, garlic) comes next.  A few years ago I, or rather Santa, gave D the ultimate garlic peeler:  a square of nubbly white rubber.  You put the clove on the square, fold the rubber over the clove, and rub vigorously.  The white papery skin is rubbed loose, and you can pull it off the clove.  So, it's a quick process to get 8-10 cloves into the canola oil.  Then, you pour in the popcorn, put on the lid, and shake the kettle so the popcorn is well coated with oil.

Soon, the popcorn starts hailing against the lid, with a tinny percussive pop, pop, popopopopopop.  I shake it occasionally to keep it from burning, but during these few minutes I'm prepping for the next step, grating parmesan cheese.  The popping dies down from a furious charivari to a slow pop.......poppop.........pop.  I turn off the gas and take off the lid.  When the cooler air hits the mass of kernels, it responds with a last crackle.  I shake the watery oil from the lid onto the kernels and add a layer of grated cheese.  Then I shake on a half cup of yellow large flake nutritional yeast and a tsp or so of salt.  Using a spatula, I toss the corn, mixing in the toppings, scraping the bottom of the pan, making sure the kernels, cloves, and toppings are evenly dispersed.  Then, I add another layer of cheese, yeast, salt.  If D is around, I will occasionally add some melted butter, but it's a wasted effort:  he doesn't like the nutritional yeast.  And, while I appreciate the butter's ability to coat the corn, and to help disperse the toppings throughout the mass of kernels, I don't particularly like the resulting greasy fingers.

Dinner is served:   I scoop it out of the kettle into a large bowl, making sure to scrape up the crumbly ochre-colored yeast/parm mix and catching as many garlic cloves as possible.  Some are crunchy and black, but most are a delectably soft tart-sweet-pungent mouthful that contrasts wonderfully with the browned-butter taste of the yeast and parm.  Some of the cheese has clumped from the heat of the popcorn, but there is always a loose powder of cheese and yeast at the bottom of the bowl.  I slide my index finger along the bowl, picking up the yeast and licking it off.

Last night I had the multiple bonuses of bad tv, knitting, and a snoozing dog sharing the couch with me.  It was a truly lovely evening.

Tonight, D and I went to St. Jack's.  It was a belated Valentine's Day dinner.  I've been meaning to give it a trial for over a year, and it did not disappoint.  We ate off the happy hour menu, which had commendable variety of pate, salad, mussels, hamburgers.  The cocktails were inventive, and the pommes frites were the perfect mix of crunchy salty parsley-flaked outside and soft potato-y inside.  The aioli dip consoled me for the lack of my traditional ketchup.

However, it was not the perfect dining experience.  The music was a dissonant mix of old French jazz standards and modern techno.  The tables were small and too close together, and the chairs seemed flimsy and unable to support a hanging coat or purse.  At first we were seated next to a younger couple.  Six inches separated our small rectangular tables-for-two.  She leaned forward tensely, talking in a very public voice about very private matters.  I asked to be moved, and we were, into the hidden back room, up a step from the main dining room.  While the bar had a warm wooden floor, the restaurant floor was a checkerboard of tiny black and white octagonal tiles.  The high ceilings sported hanging Schoolhouse lamps.  The Victorian moldings and woodwork were left intact, but the bar area was modern steel and glass, lined with enormous white wax mountains supporting tall candles.  The ambiance was that of cold coziness.  Schizoid, in fact.

However our waiter was delightful, displaying the unobtrusive attentiveness that is so rare and so wonderful when encountered.  He even brought me a taste of the Horse Heaven Hills Cinsaut as we were leaving, just because I was curious.  (I liked it a lot:  a sort of musky pinot noir.)

All things considered, however, I think I preferred the popcorn dinner.