A Bowl of Snowflakes

Part of the appeal of Halloween – at least for us baby boomers – is the thought of innocent days (and nights) from our distant past. Not only were we kids back then, we cavorted in full costumes through our neighborhoods without a parent in sight. Every house left a light on or a door open to welcome trick-or-treating. Every street seemed safe and inviting.  And the treats were often as homemade as they were store-bought. Cookies. Lollipops. The odd neighbor doling out little sausages hot off the grill from his front yard (BBQ sauce optional). And the occasional popcorn ball.

Who doesn’t love a good popcorn ball?  Me.  I don’t.  Popcorn balls may be a nostalgic Halloween memory but they’re also an insult to popcorn.  Whoever invented them turned a savory snack into a sickly sweet one.  We’re not talking caramel-, chocolate-, or even kettle-corn sweet here;  just liquid sugar designed to act as glue to make popcorn a convenient handheld.  Awful.

I admit it, I’ve become a popcorn snob the way some people are about coffee.  There’s a way to enjoy popcorn and there’s a dozen ways not to.  It’s a snack that deserves to get it right, because getting it wrong is anything but a “treat” (like popcorn balls).

Popcorn eased its way into our after-dinner desserts by necessity.  One day (night) my wife and I sat there after the evening meal and realized we were having dessert way too often.  It was always ice cream, cookies, or whatever else we could find in the pantry.  Somehow a savory dinner necessitated a sweet dessert.  Bad habit – very bad.  Instead, make the dinner healthy enough, eat it early enough, and keep yourself off the couch watching TV.  Then dessert rarely enters the conversation.  Yeah, uh, we’re still working on that.  The dinners are healthy, but we can never get them on the table – er, couch – before 7pm.

Popcorn to the rescue. It’s a dessert that doesn’t feel like a dessert.  It’s not sweet, and with an air popper it’s all of three ingredients.  Popped corn, topped with butter and salt.  Make those first two “organic” and the last one “Celtic sea”, and it sounds like something that’s actually good for you.

Popcorn belongs in a bowl, not in a ball.  We take the largest bowl in our kitchen, fill it almost full with popped corn, and call it dessert.  Oh, right, but that’s just for me.  Then we take the second-largest bowl in our kitchen and pop a similar serving for my wife.

Since I always aim to educate a little, here’s popcorn trivia worth remembering.  One, the corn used for popping is not the same as the kernels on the cob (so don’t get any ideas).  Two, when the kernels burst – literally inside out – you get one of two shapes; snowflakes or mushrooms.  Snowflakes are what we have at night for dessert, and what you find severely overpriced in movie theaters.  Mushrooms are what you find in a box of Cracker Jack or Fiddle-Faddle.  Think teeny-tiny popcorn balls.  As for the kernels that don’t pop?  They’re called “old maids”.  In the world of popcorn at least, you’d rather be a snowflake than an old maid.

Some more fun facts.  Popcorn displaced movie candy during the WWII years because there was a shortage of sugar.  Years later it’s still the more popular concession at the theater.  On average every American consumes 58 quarts of popcorn every year.  Picture those red/white striped cardboard containers you see when you purchase popcorn from a cart.  Multiply by 58.  You eat a lot of popcorn.  But why shouldn’t you?  It’s convenient, easy-to-make, and healthy as long as you use an air popper.  Really healthy if you substitute olive oil for the butter, which a lot of people do these days.  But I say ewwwwwww to that.  Leave olive oil to the Mediterranean diet instead.

All this talk of popcorn has me thinking it’s time for dessert.  It’s easy to forego the sweet stuff when savory snowflakes beckon.  Just remember, it’s not a ball of popcorn, it’s a bowl.  A proper presentation precedes perfect popcorn.

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LEGO Trevi Fountain – Update #2

(Read about the start of this build in Brick Wall Waterfall)

Let it echo throughout the streets of Rome, Dave is no Michelangelo (and yes, I know Michelangelo didn’t design the Trevi Fountain but he could sure sculpt).  In today’s effort to rise the LEGO fountain from its foundation, I made countless placement mistakes.  I got four steps into Bag 4 – of 15 bags of pieces – and realized I’d placed everything  just a little bit off on the foundation.  That meant breaking it all down, going back to the first step, and starting over.  Can you imagine my fate if I made this mistake with the real Trevi?  Placed and set the travertine just a little bit off?  The foreman would have my head! (which is no joke, at least not three hundred years ago).

Frankly, everything seemed off today.  I kept getting the piece placement slightly wrong, as if I refused to learn from my last mistake.  At one point I turned two pages forward in the instruction manual instead of one, skipping a full two steps in the build.  And the below photo is what “broke the camel’s travertine”.  Tell me reader, what’s wrong with this picture?  Five little leftover pieces and one BIG piece, that’s what.  LEGO never throws in big leftover pieces.  Sure enough, I paged back through the manual, and there it was.  I’d overlooked the step where you place that arch.  Never mind that it’s buried under “pieces” of blue water now.  Leave it out and our beautiful fountain might collapse into a pile of very expensive rubble.

You know who’s laughing about all of my missteps today?  The singers in the music I chose for my accompaniment: Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.  His opera may be about money, disguises, lovers and all that, but it sounded more like getting scolded over and over through song.  You got overconfident, Dave (tra-la-la).  You’re no sculptor, Dave (la-ha-ha).  Maybe LEGO isn’t for you after all, Dave (wha-ha-ha-HA!)

The gleeful singing in “The Barber of Seville” is all in Italian, so for all I know they really did change their tune to berate my amateur building efforts.  I took that to heart.  Bags 5 and 6 are gonna have to wait until next week.  I sure hope the foreman won’t look at this decision as “getting behind schedule”.  He might have my head!

Running build time: 1 hr. 44 min.

Total leftover pieces: 10

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.