caramel corn – Curious as a Cathy

Heather from Acting Balanced hosts a Monday Quiz About Me. What’s that? It’s not Monday! Who said? Okay, okay, I’m not losing it or am I? Actually, I decided to go with the flow of things by incorporating Heather’s meme in with today’s random post.

1. Do you consider Halloween a holiday for children or adults? Halloween is a holiday for all ages!

2. At what age should children stop trick or treating? This is a good question, I think by the time our kids reached 12 then they were getting too old to go door to door. From that point, we just did our own thing. I made it fun by making special goodies and we watched some creepy old movies.

3. What are your plans for Halloween? We have no real plans for Halloween. Since the kids are grown, I prefer to leave the porch light off to discourage trick or treaters. I’d rather be in bed instead of handing out candy. Yeah, I’m a party pooper. I know.

4. What frightens you? Politicians raising taxes. That’s scarier than monsters under my bed or skeletons in my closet. The hard-working middle class is who the liberals are out to destroy in America! Okay, I realize THIS isn’t what you were wanting with this question. But, it was the first thing that came to mind.

I cannot believe how quickly this year has slipped by. Halloween is tomorrow. We don’t do much in the way of celebrating this holiday. Not that I’m against it or anything. It’s just we aren’t big Halloween fans, but I do enjoy having a pumpkin to carve and I enjoy making our traditional goodies: home-made caramels and caramel corn. These recipes are simple crowd pleasures, I tell you. Click, here, for my home-made caramel recipe and below you will see my Caramel Corn recipe…

This is what you need:

16 c. popped corn (approx. 2/3 c unpopped)
1/2 c. butter
1/2 t. salt
1 c. brown sugar packed
1/c light corn syrup
1/2 t. vanilla

Preheat oven 200 degrees.

Placed popped corn on large oven roasting pan. Set aside.

Carmel coating: in heavy 2 qt. saucepan over med heat: brown sugar, butter, corn syrup, & salt bring to boil. Boil for 5-mins, stirring frequently. Remove from heat stir in vanilla. Pour caramel over corn coat well. Bake for 1 hr stirring corn about every 10-mins. Remove from pan(s) to cool on wax paper. NOTE: If you like nuts in your caramel corn, then add them. It’s good that way, too. I like adding pecans and walnuts on occasion, but my crew prefers it without the nuts. One more thing, I double up on the caramel coating to insure I have enough. Enjoy!

Autumn just wouldn’t be the same without these sweet treats for Halloween.

Our weather has gotten funky wild with the highs being in the upper 40s for past few days. There is even mention of snow in our forecast for today. Crazy, huh? That really is for our neck of the woods. In fact the only time I can recall ever seeing snow this early is on Halloween 19 years ago when I was prego with DS.

Who’s thinking about Christmas other than me? Come on, don’t be shy! I am getting all hyper thinking of all the fun I can get into. I am already planning my cards to stamp and DIY projects. Watch for posts to come revealing what I’m gonna do this year!

My buds in Blogosphere are awesome. I will tell you why, because you know precisely where I was coming from last Thursday when I wrote What do I do?. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for encouraging and understanding.

For now, I’m not ready to skip out on anyone. Least of all… you guys! Your friendship means the world to me. I am just going to go with my instinct on blogging when I feel like it and when I don’t then I know YOU will be there for me when I do return. Trust me, I don’t believe I’ll absolutely jump ship entirely. The worse case scenario will be a day off here and there or scrambling to squeeze in a late blog hop post.

Grab a cup of coffee and follow me (see Daily Blog Hops at the top of this page) as I visit a few of my regular random/coffee chat buds!