If someone asks me my favorite food, I have trouble narrowing down all the different foods I love. But if we just looked at sheer lifetime total volume, popcorn is almost certainly the food I've eaten the most of. Sometimes I just eat a big bowl of popcorn for a meal. I love movie popcorn, microwave popcorn, stale popcorn... But I usually stick to just good popcorn popped in oil with salt. I've never been too much into flavors on my popcorn.
This summer at Lollapalooza we had a couple bags of Graham Elliot's Truffle/Parmesan Popcorn and that was pretty darn good. Truffle, though, is just on that edge where it doesn't seem like something I would keep in the kitchen. It seems too fancy of an ingredient. But then we were visiting my family in Austin and had the Sage/Parmesan Popcorn at the Alamo Drafthouse. Ho-lee. It's not an overwhelming flavor, but the smokiness of the sage and the bite of the cheese just make the popcorn that much more snackable.
And sage is totally obtainable at my local grocery store. I did some googling and the recipe is very simple:
Finely chop a tablespoon or so of fresh sage (10 leaves or so) and grate a couple tablespoons worth of parmesan.
Make a batch of popcorn however you normally do that (I've got my hand-crank stovetop popcorn maker, (you can see it in the lower-right of the picture below) but you know, whatever). Put it in a bowl and salt and pepper it.
In a small saucepan (or the pan you just made popcorn in) melt a tablespoon or two of butter. Toss in the sage and cook it until the sage crisps up a bit. Drizzle the sage butter over the popcorn, add the parmesan and mix it all up.
Eat up!
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