Buttered Popcorn Cookies

I recently found out that a friend of mine hates popcorn. And it’s funny, because, whereas most people’s food dislikes generally seem harmless but mildly understandable-tomatoes, eggs, broccoli rabe, fish (ahem) – who doesn’t like popcorn? Popcorn?

I harassed her for a while about this. She talked about hating how the shell-like kernels scratched her mouth, about the taste of the fake-buttery slick of the packaged stuff and the steaminess that comes out of the bag when it’s opened, and how nightmarish movie theaters are for people like her. She said she’d fallen in the past for powdery ‘cheddar’-dusted popcorn, and caramel popcorn mixed with nuts, but she knew you could also cover cardboard with that stuff and it would taste good. She insisted that nobody liked pop­ corn plain-you either admitted that it smelled funky or you were lying-that they just liked the stuff you put on it, and that stuff was like a chemistry set. She went on and on. I was impressed by how much thought she’d put into it.

Still, I decided we couldn’t be friends after that. Um, just kid­ ding! No, I decided that the only thing I could possibly love more than buttered popcorn would be to take that buttered popcorn and put it into a cookie. It follows basic snack maths, which is that two forms of junk food together always exceed the greatness of them separately, especially when you mix the salty and the sweet. It’s like chocolate-covered pretzels, salted chocolate caramel sauce, or potato chips crushed inside a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich (don’t look at me like that; those kids at the second-grade lunch table were geniuses).