So today I got hungry. And I decide to make popcorn.

We had some unpopped pop corn in the pantry from our Oscar party. And I had read on Treehugger how you can make microwave popcorn with the normal stuff. You don’t need to buy the bags. And you really shouldn’t buy the bags, since they can kill you. And not just in laboratory rats. Real-life microwave popcorn eaters have gotten cancer from cooking the fake butter. But I digress.

You’re supposed to put the corn in a brown paper lunch bag. But that doesn’t seem very treehugger-y.

First, I tried a paper boat. Which I realize is also disposable and negates my argument above. But I didn’t have any brown paper lunch bags, so the environmental reasoning came later. It’s one of those boats that they served French Fries in at your school cafeteria. We got about 100 of them when we purchased our house. I don’t know why the previous owners needed so many paper boats (and obviously they didn’t either since they left them). But I like to imagine the previous owner sitting down to lunch every day for a steaming paper boat full of Frito pie. Mmmm… sounds good.

So, I put them in the boat. This resulted in some really cool visuals and a bit of popping, but not enough. I cleaned out the microwave. Put the popped popcorn in a bowl and put the unpopped kernels in another bowl. Then I put a third bowl on top of the unpopped kernels and threw that back into the microwave. This time the popping was more contained, although not as entertaining. Ok, it was still pretty entertaining. I like watching the top bowl, slowly separate from the bottom as the popcorn inside gets bigger and bigger. What can I say, I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV as a kid.

This worked pretty well. Still too many unpopped kernels, but a lot more popcorn. The only problem is that it kind of fuses to the bowls. So, I’ll have to work on that. At this point I had enough popcorn to eat, but I’ll return to my experimentation at a later date.