Looking for a fun way to warm up a winter virtual school day? Me too! I love getting forwarded emails filled with suggestions. I'm almost always ready to try something at least once.
It was only natural that when I received an email about making homemade popcorn in a brown paper lunch bag, I was enticed by the promise of a wonderful, inexpensive, different, simple, nutritious snack being ready in a minute (be still my heart)! It also gives my daughter and I the opportunity to use all those great reasoning skills she's learning in her courses.
I did a search for "brown paper bag popcorn" and found many people that said making popcorn in a brown paper bag would work just fine, there are even some references to it on some well known cooking sites. Some of the directions given suggested stapling the bag shut so that the popcorn doesn't pop out while microwaving. I had some lunch bags and popcorn kernels and decided to give it a try.
Suddenly I started thinking about whether or not a staple in the microwave was a good idea. So, once again I headed back to my trusty search engine and rethought the questions that I was typing in. Instead of searching for "brown paper bag popcorn", I searched for "microwave food containers safety". This second search led me in a whole new direction!
It wasn't the popcorn or the microwave that could be a problem, it was the brown paper bag!
The Popcorn Board explains on their Web site:
"Plain and/or recycled papers ...