One day, for reasons I no longer recall, I visited the website of Maille, a famous French mustard brand and national institution of sorts (its history going back to 1747). I noticed that it offered a number of recipes that call for mustard, including desserts! This naturally intrigued me and I began looking for something to veganize. I settled upon their honey-mustard caramel corn, a fun item that’s halfway between a dessert and a snack. And it was pretty good! I made it at my parents’ house, which provided me with an immediate test panel. The results of this two-person population sample were conclusive: it was a hit! Or rather, my mom loved it and my dad wouldn’t try it at all, but that doesn’t count since he might very well have liked it if he’d just given it a chance. Right?

The French recipe is already very nearly vegan, with the exception of the honey. Elsewhere on this blog I’ve already shown you how to make a fantastic apple honey, but failing that you can also look for one of the ready-made vegan honeys that have been popping up here and there, or even a ready-made vegan honey mustard.

For ideas for what to watch while munching on this caramel corn, scroll to the end of this post and you’ll find a list of some of my favorite lesser-known films.

Honey mustard

• 1/4 cup (60 ml) mild mustard of your choice
• 2 tablespoons vegan honey (see my recipe here)
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder

Whisk the four ingredients together in a small bowl.

After using 3 tablespoons for the caramel corn recipe, you can serve the rest as a dip for pretzels or crudités, or incorporate it into a salad dressing.

Honey mustard caramel corn

• 3 tablespoons honey mustard (see recipe above)
• 3 tablespoons melted coconut oil
• 1/4 cup (50 g) granulated sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup (95 g) unpopped popcorn kernels, or 15 cups popped
• 1/4 cup (30 g) peanuts or mixed nuts (optional)

Equipment needed: large stockpot with a lid to make the popcorn in (if making on the stovetop), oven for baking the caramel coating into the popcorn

First, make your popcorn, either on your stovetop (for instructions, click here), in a microwave or using a fancy popcorn popper, if you have one. Do not add salt or any other seasonings.

Preheat your oven to 200°F (100°C). Combine the honey mustard, melted coconut oil (melt it beforehand so you can easily measure the amount needed) and sugar in a medium saucepan and heat over medium, stirring often, until the sugar has melted, about 3 or 4 minutes.

Turn off the heat and add the baking soda (the mixture will suddenly bubble up and grow) and whisk for 30 seconds or so.

With the popcorn in a large bowl, slowly add the caramel mixture, stirring constantly. It is VERY helpful to do this with the help of a second person – one to pour and one to stir.

Continue stirring, the idea being to coat all the popcorn evenly. If you’re using nuts, this would be a good time to add them. But if you forget you can throw them in at the very end (they just won’t stick to the popcorn).

Once you’ve coated it all, transfer the popcorn to a large baking dish, preferably large enough that you can stir the popcorn during the baking process without any kernels falling overboard.

Bake at 200°F (100°C) for 20 minutes or so, stirring occasionally. The goal with the baking process is to dry and harden the caramel mixture so that the resulting caramel corn is nice and crunchy. Depending on your oven, this may take less or more time than it did for me.

The French recipe strangely doesn’t include this baking step, which is probably just an oversight or the result of not testing the recipe before publishing it.

Serve and enjoy! Store any uneaten caramel corn in a container with a tight lid to keep humidity out.

No idea what to watch?

If you’re fresh out of ideas for what to watch, check out my suggestions for some older or lesser-known but excellent films.

Goodbye Again (1961) by Anatole Litvak. Paula Tessier (Ingrid Bergman) is a 40-year-old interior designer who for the past five years has been the mistress of Roger Demarest (Yves Montand), a philandering business executive who refuses to stop seeing other women. When Paula meets Philip (Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame), the 25-year-old son of one of her wealthy clients, he falls in love with her and insists that the age difference will not matter. Filmed in English, Goodbye Again is set in Paris and based on Françoise Sagan’s novel Aimez-Vous Brahms?

Le Pays des Sourds (In the Land of the Deaf, 1992) by Nicolas Philibert. This French documentary is a beautiful homage to deaf culture, providing an unsentimental look into the daily lives of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals from all walks of life. The little-known film was featured in a number of international film festivals and won a Peabody Award.

Secrets & Lies (1996) by Mike Leigh. Hortense Cumberbatch, a successful black middle-class optometrist in London who was adopted as a child, has chosen to trace her family history after the death of her adoptive mother. After being warned by public officials about the troubles she could face by tracking her birth mother down, she continues her investigation and is baffled to learn that her mother is white; she does not resent this fact and wants to know more about her past.

Shall We Dance? (1996) by Masayuki Suo. Shohei Sugiyama (Kōji Yakusho) is a successful salaryman, with a house in the suburbs, a devoted wife and a teenage daughter. He works as an accountant for a firm in Tokyo. Despite these signs of success, however, Shohei begins to feel as if his life has lost meaning and falls into depression. One night, coming home on the train, he spots a beautiful woman with a melancholy expression looking out from a window in a dance studio. Shohei decides to take lessons to get to know her better, and his life changes once his classes begin.

Little Senegal (2001) by Rachid Bouchareb. Aging Senegalese man Alloune (Sotigui Kouyaté) curates a slavery museum in his home country. Spurred by the reaction of curious patrons, Alloune is inspired to find the descendants of the people brought to the United States during the slave trade. So he travels to America, eventually landing in New York and meeting up with his cab driver nephew, Hassan (Karim Koussein Traore), Hassan’s girlfriend, Biram (Adja Diarra), and storekeeper Ida (Sharon Hope), who might be Alloune’s distant relative.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) by Mike Leigh. Thirty years old and single, primary school teacher Pauline “Poppy” Cross is free-minded, high-spirited and kind-hearted. When Poppy takes driving lessons for the first time, her positive attitude contrasts starkly with her gloomy, intolerant and cynical driving instructor, Scott. He is emotionally repressed, has anger problems and becomes extremely agitated by Poppy’s casual attitude towards driving.

La Femme aux 5 Eléphants (The Woman with the 5 Elephants, 2010) by Vadim Jendreyko. This touching documentary offers a glimpse into the life of translator Svetlana Geier, an elderly Russian woman who for years has been working with a German translation partner to produce a German version of five major works by Dostoyevsky into German, her “five elephants”. As we see her work, we learn her life story and in particular the reason behind the passion that drives her to translate these novels.

Isle of Dogs (2018) by Wes Anderson. This stop-motion-animated science-fiction comedy drama is set in a dystopian near-future Japan. The story follows a pack of banished dogs, led by street dog Chief (Bryan Cranston), who helps a young boy named Atari (Koyu Rankin) search for his own dog after the species is banished to an island following the outbreak of a canine flu. Of all the movies listed here, this may be the best known, but I’m so fond of it I wanted to give it a shout-out.

For more film suggestions, check out my list of classic Christmas flicks, which can safely be enjoyed at other times of the year too!