It rained much of the weekend here in Los Angeles and the kids were getting a little squirrelly, which I guess explains how I found myself at 9 in the morning making them popcorn. I figured, there are worse things to feed a kid, and what could be wrong with serving them such a minimally processed food. A whole kernel is about as whole food as you can get (okay, so it wasn’t organic and it’s part of the whole subsidized corn industrial complex, but it had been raining all weekend and I had a rebellion fomenting! What else was I going to do?) So I popped it up and it sure smelled good and I was a little peckish myself and wanting just a bit more than the lightly salted effect that the kids were satisfied with. My parents had kindly gifted me a small glass of black truffle oil over the holidays, so I drizzled some over the popcorn while hot. I know it’s a far cry from the real thing, and I think Papa Anthony Bourdain, or some other fellow called it the ketchup of the upper class, but, man, it adds some satisfying super savory umami to the whole crunchy, salty, toasty equation. Violet smelled it and requested some and promptly declared her love for truffled popcorn. I highly recommend it. It’s gotta be better for you than butter, right? I’m betting that at the very least it’s superior in all ways to Cap’n Crunch.
—Hugh
