My guilty pleasure: Imen McDonnell’s hot popcorn and Milk Duds

Throughout Food Month we will have a daily “Guilty Pleasure” feature where well-known faces share their secret treats, from the delicious to the daring to the downright strange. And you can win a great prize if your share your guilty pleasure with us. See below for details

“Whether I’m sad/happy/hungover, my guilty pleasure is devouring a bag of hot, buttered, salty popcorn combined with a box of Milk Duds (chocolate covered chewy caramel things) mixed in while escaping to a killer film at the cinema.

"After many years of not being able to indulge in this guilty pleasure where I live in Ireland, I have finally been able to experience this bliss again as Odeon cinemas do ultra-buttered popcorn and our local sweet shop now stocks American sweets, including my magnificent Milk Duds. Hooray!

"A very close second would be bingeing on a massive, mile-high hot pastrami and Swiss cheese on caraway rye sandwich from someplace like Carnegie Deli in Manhattan. When I lived and worked in New York as a television producer, I would always be leaving the studio late and starving. Sometimes I'd stop at the deli on the way home, pick up a huge pastrami sandwich, get home and eat it all by myself, with a side of kosher pickle included."

Imen McDonnell is a food and lifestyle writer from the United States, now living on a farm in rural Ireland. Her first book, Farmette, Stories and Recipes from Life on an Irish Farm, will be published by Roost Books in spring 2016. See farmette.ie

[ guilty@irishtimes.com  ]

[ irishtimes.com/food ]