Sausage Gravy - you know you want some!

I'm making Sausage Gravy for my very late breakfast. I've been wanting some for a while now. I finally bought some sausage over the weekend so I could have some. A couple pieces of buttered whole grain Toast and gravy and I'll be in hog heaven!! Making this gravy is really very easy. I like more gravy in mine where some places have more sausage than gravy. But, I'll give you the basics and you can adapt to your own tastes.

1/2 lb of breakfast sausage (you choose your own variety that works for you)
scant 1/4 cup of flour to sprinkle liberally over the browned sausage
about 2 cups of milk to pour over after the flour/sausage mixture has cooked to desired brownness

Stir frequently to get the tasty bits off the bottom of the pan and to keep the gravy from developing lumps. Cook until the desired thickness, then serve to your heart's content. Obviously, you'll need more ingredients for more people, so double or triple them as needed. But, use a deeper pan if you're making a lot. And, season with salt and pepper if you desire. Sausage can be salty, so I wait until I taste it. Or I add salt to my plate.

(Previously published to Bubblews.com in real time. No time editing made.

Scrapple and Eggs and Whole Grain Toast! Pure Deliciousness!

Whole grain toast, scrambled eggs and pan-fried scrapple

Before I go much further, let me explain scrapple. According to Google, it is a noun. It consists of scraps of pork or other meat stewed with cornmeal and shaped into loaves for slicing and frying. From Dictionary.com we find: cornmeal mush mixed with pork scraps, seasoned with onions, spices, herbs, etc., and shaped into loaves and sliced for frying. But, according to me, it is just plain delicious!!

Basically, scrapple originated with the Pennsylvania Dutch as a way to use up all the meat from a slaughtered hog that wasn't being used some other way. It would all be cooked down with spices (mostly sage, thyme and pepper) and cornmeal into a mush. That would be poured into pans and allowed to cool. Once cooled, it would be cut into blocks which were then sliced and pan fried for breakfast (usually). I grew up on it and I love it. 

The eggs are simply eggs. The only way I will eat them is scrambled or some derivative of scrambled (omelets, quiches, etc). I mix mine with milk so that their texture is somewhat custard-y.

The toast is a recent purchase from my first ever visit to a Trader Joe's supermarket. I've heard so much about them, but I am never close to one. So, when my friend decided to stop there to look for a particular item, I went in, too, since I knew I needed bread and milk. I found this wonderful loaf of sliced artisan bread just chock full of whole grains. It has made the most wonderful toast!! I eat it toasted with chunky peanut butter or just buttered as I did with this meal. It is just so good, I want to go back and get more!!

Now, back to scrapple, according to Wikipedia, scrapple bears similarities to white pudding and hog's pudding of England. Now I know I won't eat black pudding (blood pudding) because they do incorporate the blood into it, but if I'm ever in the UK again, I might just try either of those other two just to see how they compare.

Originally published on my Bubblews account.