Cornmeal Scrapple and Perspective

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I’m in the process of learning about humility and vulnerability.Occasionally I’m wrong.  I know there are people that are secretly cheering that I’m admitting this publicly.  I don’t like when I fail.  There are people who are much, much braver than I am that relish the opportunity to fail because of the lessons they learn.  I am prideful.  I am a perfectionist and often will not do a task until I can be relatively sure that I will succeed or have support if I don’t.  I don’t ask for help easily and generally have to explore all my options before admitting that I don’t know how to do something. There are so few things that I’m actually an expert on that I should be better at this.  I’m not.  Didn’t Edison talk about finding all the ways not to make a light bulb?

I am rapidly becoming an expert on learning to do things the hard way.  For instance this scrapple recipe, or really anything that I’ve tried to do in a loaf pan except bread.  I’m good with bread.  

So what happens when your recipe fails?  Where it doesn’t work out the way you were expecting?  In the case of the egg foo yung, I nearly redeemed myself with popover chicken, but was ultimately saved because we had dessert first.  In this case…

I was really hoping for something spectacular here.  I made a grits casserole a few times that was really good.  I’d eaten scrapple before. Scrapple is a Pennsylvania thing.  I read about it in a book and was surprised to see it at our grocery store.  We bought it and fried it up for breakfast.  I was hoping this would be like that.  Or maybe like pan-fried polenta.  Nope.  Nothing like that.  My first attempts ended in mush.  Tasty mush, but mush.  Like the sort of mush the meatball became in “On Top of Spaghetti.”

It was early enough in the day that I was still creative.  I added an egg and a bit of flour and was able to make a sort of pancake out of it.  It wasn’t bad with a lot of maple syrup on it.  I like mine with syrup.

The obvious lesson here is that a failure isn’t the end.  Changing expectations and applying your knowledge can help turn the failure into something more successful.  It doesn’t mean that whatever you’ve created exceeds all expectations, but you made something crappy less crappy.  That means something.  If Thomas Edison’s method of inventing the light bulb holds true, I only have about 1,999 tries before I create perfect cornmeal scrapple.  

Cornmeal Scrapple

A fried cornmeal and sausage cake

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Cook Time 25 minutes mins

Total Time 2 hours hrs 25 minutes mins

Course Breakfast

Cuisine American

Ingredients

  

• 1 cup Cornmeal
• 1 cup Milk
• 1 tsp Sugar
• 1 tsp Salt
• 8 oz Bulk Sausage cooked and drained

Instructions

 

• Gradually stir cornmeal, milk, sugar, and salt into 2 3/4 cup boiling water and cook for 10-15 minutes stirring often.
• Add sausage.
• Put into a loaf pan, cover and chill.
• Slice, dip into flour, and fry

Notes

This did not work out the way I expected.  My loaf was too watery and wouldn't hold a slice.

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