The other day I decided to try do something with that sack of cornmeal that’s been sitting in the freezer for over a year. I looked around the web for a simple recipe I could use as a starting point and settled on cornmeal mush.
I mixed a half cup of cornmeal with a half cup of water and let it sit for a while. While it was sitting, I put 1½ cups of water and some diced bacon in a pot. While I was waiting for the water to boil, I added some garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, cayenne, parsely, and basil.
Once the water was boiling, I spooned in the cornmeal sludge, and stirred the whole thing up. The cornmeal mush was okay, but there was enough that I decided to perform a second experiment with the leftovers. I put the remainder in a small pan and stuck it in the fridge.
The following evening, I took out the pan, sliced the contents into three portions (each the size of a fish patty) and fried them like scrapple. They looked scary, so the dogs each got one portin and I got the last. They were actually quite good! I made some more of the stuff last night (using pork sausage instead of bacon) and a breadpan full of it now rests in the fridge, awaiting knife and frying.
Has anyone else just dumped out some ingredients and wound up with something worth eating?
Plenty of times. My mom and I had to live by ourselves this summer. No one shops or cooks when my dad isn’t there. (My mom works too much, and I am a teenager, I am a hunter gatherer in a society of Fast food.) It got scary after a few months.
“Hmm…I wonder what you can do with Corn Flakes and cream of chicken soup…”
I never remember any of my concoctions in the kitchen. They are edible about 50% of the time. They are never repeated because I never have the same stuff left in the cabinets at the end of the shopping cycle.
Ummm, southerner checking in here, but isn’t scrapple, in fact, meat and meat by-products? At least the stuff my Pennsylvanian step-dad cooked and gave me was…and he called it scrapple. Yuck.
The second batch of “scrapple” I made isn’t a prize-winner. The loaf didn’t firm up as much in the pan, so the slices have the consistency of thick pudding. Is there any way to fix that? (Or am I stuck with a breadpan full of cold cornmeal mush?)
