Kettle Corn Machine for the Dicksons

This post is about the meeting of two interests.  Last month, I won $500 for an article I submitted to Evergreen Surveyor.  Since then, I've been trying to figure out what I wanted to spend the money on.  For the last year (at least) Dode has been thinking about building a kettle corn machine for our family.  Last week while I had the children at the ocean to enjoy spring break, Dode was busy surfing craigslist for a wonderful "treasure".  He found a commercial kettle corn machine in Olympia for $200.  That was about half the price that he thought he could build one for.

He sent me an email about it and told me they sell new for around $2,000.  With the money I had won burning a hole in my pocket, I said, "Go for it".  Janice was looking for a bit of adventure so Dode, Sheri and Janice loaded into Janice's truck after work the next day and drove to Olympia to pick it up (about a 2 hour drive each way).

When he got there, he saw that the machine had seen heavy use and the bottom of the kettle had even been replaced by a new piece of stainless steal, but it was usable and heavy duty so he brought it home.

We got back from the beach on Wednesday night and the children could hardly stand to wait to try it out.  Thursday evening, we took the kettle corn machine over to Dode's grandparents for the inaugural use.  His cousins Tracy and Erin were visiting from Utah.  We'd watched a "how to make kettle corn" video on YouTube but weren't really sure what to do.  You can do anything after seeing it on YouTube right?  What better way to experiment than in front of a crowd, right?!

Aunt Viv asked us what the plan was and we told her we were making it up as we went.  She decided the wise thing to do would be to move her car out of the carport far from where we would be doing the popping.  We got everything assembled and fired it up.   Soon, it was raining popcorn.  The flat, after market bottom, on our kettle encourages early popped kernels to explode out of the kettle all over the place.

Outside and getting ready.

Elizabeth stirs the pot.

We're all watching the kettle and waiting for something to happen.

The first kernel leaves the kettle.  It is a white blur near Aunt Viv's right hand.

Uncle Dave (our photographer) caught a lot of excitement in this picture!

Dode had one of the unpopped kernels, covered in melted sugar, land and stick to the skin of his collar bone and then pop.  Ouch!  I told him that's because he's such a hottie!  We didn't stop laughing until long after the popcorn was done popping.  Our kettle corn experiment definitely brought life to the crowd.  It was a cold, rainy day outside but under that carport, we were having a blast.  Dode's grandpa and grandma even stayed outside in the cold throughout both batches we did.

When the popcorn was done (popping every few seconds just like making popcorn in the microwave), Dode's cousin Tracy had the honor of dumping it out.  Unfortunately, the bin to catch the popcorn wasn't in the right place so half our first batch ended up on the ground!  

Dump it out.  Grandma is still hiding from rouge popcorn.

(click on this picture to see grandma's face)

When it was time to dump the salt on our first batch, I sprinkled what I thought was a good amount of salt over the popcorn and turned the salt shaker right side up only to have the plug on the bottom of the shaker fall out of the shaker and salt start gushing out.  So, part of the popcorn was extra salty!

We should have stopped while we were ahead because our first batch was pretty close to perfect.  We made a second batch that was on the "well done" side of cooked.  All in all, it was great fun with lots of laughter.

Clean up of the kettle corn machine is so much easier than cleaning our theater style popcorn popper.  With the theater popcorn popper, I have to clean the inside windows and all the nooks and crannies of the popping mechanism.  With the kettle corn machine, we just dumped some water in, brought it to a boil, washed it around and dumped it out.  Clean and ready to go!  We could even use our kettle to make an enormous batch of hot dogs or chili!

 Driving over to his grandparents, Dode and I remarked that it was a grey rainy day and we both had a case of the blahs.  After all the laughter and excitement, driving home our moods had lifted!   I think we brought some energy to our relatives as well!

We made another batch at home Friday night after watching the YouTube videos again.  We got that batch right and didn't even salt it extra.  The children think it should become part of our Friday night tradition.  Pizza followed by kettle corn.