The other day, Bryan asked me if he could have some popcorn. (I'm not quite sure where he had seen or heard about popcorn, since he hasn't actually had it before!) My automatic response was "Well, Bryan, I have to go to the store to see if I can find some that is safe for you." So that's what I did. I went to the aisle that had the microwave popcorn, looked at every single package, and found not a single one that did not have a milk product in it. As I got ready to go home to tell my soon-to-be-disappointed son that I couldn't find any safe popcorn, I stopped and thought for a minute. Ummmm... people made popcorn before microwaves existed, right? In fact, I remember growing up with those fun Jiffy-Pop aluminum popping pans. And while they didn't have any of those at this particular store, surely I could figure out a way to pop popcorn on the stove, right?
Armed with a nice big jar of popcorn kernels, I sat down with my cookbooks to try to figure out how to pop these things, since the label had helpful Air Popper instructions, but nothing about stovetop popping. No luck. However, I do have this wonderful thing called the "internet" that was much more helpful.
As usual, I was making things WAY more complicated than they needed to be. But in the end, Bryan got his popcorn AND we had a lot more fun than just sticking a bag into the microwave. We had a lovely math lesson as Bryan measured out the kernels, and he got to watch them actually pop, which was SUPER exciting. All in all, a great experience- one that we probably wouldn't have had if I had just been able to pull a box of microwave popcorn off the shelf. So in some ways, his allergies actually helped make things a little more fun for us this time. Every now and then, it's nice to find a silver lining in our food allergy cloud. =)
