Brown Butter Popcorn

It has been three entire days since I’ve posted a new recipe…I definitely try my best to post more often than that, but I had a recipe fail that I worked on for two days and just ended up trashing. “Chicken Parmesan Cups”….the bane of my existence. I literally tried for hours to figure out the perfect, easiest way to bake Parmesan cheese in the oven and then form it into little cups using muffin tins…so….many….attempts.

My Mother-in-Law can vouch for me on this one…I made about a thousand different “Parmesan cups” before I gave up and decided it was too difficult a task to post on my website. Seth’s parents were here for a few days this week for Seth’s Armor BOLC graduation (congratulations Seth!!!).

Anyway…so I attempted a billion times to make these Parmesan cups that would hold spoon fulls of chicken Parmesan….and obviously that didn’t work.

So I mourned the end of that recipe for a day and woke up the next morning with the idea of making little Parmesan Chicken Bites using home made pizza dough and forming them into mini, bite sized calzones. Well they ended up being way too big and a little dry, not to mention it was a ton of work rolling out sixteen little circles of dough.

So THEN I tried to make Parmesan chicken pinwheels using the left over pizza dough and filling. Those actually turned out pretty decent, but not good enough to be posted on here, in my opinion. They were good, but they weren’t amazing.

This popcorn though…totally blog worthy. I wanted to be able to post a game day recipe today since the Super Bowl is coming up…original plan: Chicken Parmesan Cups…fail. New plan: Brown Butter Popcorn. Much, much better.

Why, you may ask, did I persevere to annoying lengths to make the chicken Parmesan cups? For one reason and one reason alone….I already bought the ingredients for it and I am on a grocery budget. Aaaanyway…the point of this post isn’t the Parmesan cups, the point is the popcorn.

And this popcorn is AWESOME. Homemade popcorn is one of my favorite things ever. Seth and I probably eat it way too much. But hey, it’s way better for you than chips or any other fried, greasy snack. It does have some butter on it…but it ends up being about one tablespoon per person, which is around 100 calories. That’s really not bad.

And each serving is 2 cups! Which should be plenty. Unless you are like me and make a bowl to “share” and then end up sitting at the end of the couch eating the entire bowl and passing a few resentful handfuls out to my husband when he asks. Which is what I am doing right now…totally eating a bowl of it while writing this post.

So if you actually have portion control (unlike me when it comes to popcorn) this will be about 150 calories including the popcorn, which is amazing!

If you’ve never had brown butter before, then I have one task for you this week. Buy an entire box of butter, and use brown butter in every single meal for the next week so you can appreciate it’s deliciousness. And this recipe should be one those meals. Note how I said “meal” and not “snack.” That was intentional.

Brown butter is seriously one of the most amazing, delicious things I have ever had. I want to go high five and hug the person who accidentally walked away from the stove for a minute too long and had some slightly “burned” butter on their hands and decided to use it anyway.

It tastes toasty and nutty but still has that perfect butter flavor in the background. It’s heaven. I have used it as a pasta sauce, dipping sauce for seafood, in a bowl slurping it out with a spoon……ha, not really….or maybe I did. You’ll never know.

It brings this popcorn to a whole new level. A level ten times above the regular level.

I discovered this popcorn when I was visiting my mom in Charlotte a few years go. We got distracted and accidentally browned the butter instead of just melting it and then decided, oh wait…this actually might be awesome. And it was.

So you should really make this on Sunday as the Patriots lay the smack down on the Seahawks.

Everyone will love it. It’s super easy and quick to make, so you won’t be spending your entire day whipping up finger foods, but everyone will be just as happy with this popcorn as they would be with anything else.

And while you’re at it, you should try my Buffalo Chicken Potato Skins with Greek Yogurt Ranch for the big game too. They are also some of the best things ever.

Yum..popcorn.

Here is the recipe!

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