Sweet!

Did you ever have one of those days where you thought you would shake so much with sheer frustration that you might completely disintegrate? Yeah. And I was going to post about one of those things, but you know, I'd rather feel my positive energy or whatever. It's more healing.

So tonight after dinner I had a craving for caramel corn which I get on occasion. And I thought well, I have popcorn to pop, and I have caramel sauce for ice cream. This is what you do:

1. Pop some corn in whatever method you like. calloocallay taught me how to do it on the stove in a pot, which is easy and quick.
   
2. Decant a couple tablespoons of really good caramel sauce. I had some rich, not too sweet stuff in the back of my cabinet and that made a lot of difference. You need to heat it in the microwave for a little bit longer than they instruct, as you want it less goopy and more syrupy-liquidy—say half again as long; 15s instead of 10s.
   
3. Pour the caramel over the popcorn in thin ribbons, stirring the popcorn all the time. If you've ever made the real thing, that should look familiar. It won't be fully coated, but each piece should have a little bit of caramel on it.
   
4. You may want to eat this with a spoon. It's really fucking sticky.

That's it! I don't care for cake and never have, so my grandmother, who was the cake decorator in the family, made me caramel popcorn balls every year for my birthday, and this reminded me of those big pans full of caramel corn that we'd make the balls from. Yum.

Last night I went out to dinner with ali_wildgoose (food okay, waiter pretty mean) and then we met up with emsariel et soror for a really fun reading by Rob Brezsny (of Real Astrology fame) and Kelly Link. Kelly read a great story called Monster, and Rob had us all singing about positive energy: Evil is boring. Cynicism is stupid. Despair is lazy. Color me a convert!