It all began about a month ago when my daughter, Wendi Granger Stanley asked me if I would make corn nuggets for my grandson Aidan's, Thanksgiving Feast at school. I must admit I had never even heard of a corn nugget, didn't even know they existed, but I said sure, why not. After all, I'm a pretty good cook and surely I could master a corn nugget, whatever it was.
So I came home and searced recipes for corn nuggets and only found a few. The upside was they sounded easy enough and hey, I can make anything, right? It was apparent I had never actually MET a corn nugget before. According to the recipe you mix a can of drained whole kernel corn and a can of creamed corn in a bowl, drop by spoonfuls on a greased cookie sheet and freeze overnight. The next day you prepare a batter, coat the frozen nuggets in the batter and deep fry. Easy, right? Not so much.
With the recipe safely printed out, I put the corn nuggets out of my mind until a few days ago. Wednesday, I mixed the two kinds of corn, dropped by spoonfuls on the cookie sheet and popped them in the freezer. All was going well at that point. Yesterday at some point, I decided to do a trial run on a few nuggets, so I got them out of the freezer. Well, obviously after I dropped neat little spoonfuls of corn on the cookie sheet, but before they actually froze, the liquid in the creamed corn caused all the little nuggets to spread out and run together and I had a nice solid sheet of frozen corn, no nuggets.
No problem. I got a sharp knife and cut the sheet of corn into bite size pieces. I then prepared the batter, dipped a couple of nuggets, placed them in the hot grease and voila, they fell apart. At this point I was beginning to really dislike whatever fool invented corn nuggets.
Back to the drawing board and by the way, it was then 8:00 at night, the night before the nuggets were to be delivered to the school. I came back to the computer, back to the recipes and began to read the comments under each recipe. A few people said they were great, easy to make, the best recipe they've ever had. I'm not sure what planet these people came from but most comments were from other nugget virgins like me, who could not get the stupid nuggets to stay together while frying, never mind they looked like mini pancakes and not nuggets.
Running out of time, I went back to the kitchen and put my thinking cap on, grabbed a bottle of booze, (just kidding....maybe..) and went to work. I placed all the corn mush back in a large bowl, started adding flour, corn meal, salt, pepper and a little sugar to the mixture. I stirred all this up, dropped a few spoonfuls of batter on a cookie sheet and they still ran everywhere. I added more flour, corn meal, etc and kept dropping until I got them the consistency I wanted.
By now I had no idea what the frankennuggets would taste like with all my additions, so I fried a couple and they were actually pretty tasty. SWEET! I dropped the rest onto cookie sheets, popped them back in the freezer, got up this morning and fried them. They turned out perfectly and were deliverd to the school without incident.
I was indeed, finally, one happy Grandma until I told this story to a friend today and she asked, "Why didn't you just go to Walmart, buy and cook the frozen ones?" What the Heck!? They make frozen corn nuggets? Arggg!
And the grand finale topper. Wendi called me tonight to tell me that Aidan said his friend Ella loved them, all the kids loved them, even his teacher loved them, but he thought they were disgusting and gross! This from the child whose favorite food in the whole world is corn.
Oh well, you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but apparently Grandma can't please Aidan with Corn Nuggets. Me thinks my affair with The Great Corn Nugget is finished. I'm moving on to another veggie.
I've never heard of a corn nugget. It sounds kinda gross.
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