There was supposed to be fried scrapple.

I have absolutely no experience serving scrapple, so I enlisted a little help on line after I had found some in the Union Square Greenmarket for the first time ever. I’m sure I read somewhere yesterday that it would be much easier to get a firm, proper slice for frying if the whole block (the form in which it arrived) were still frozen when the knife was applied.

Nope.

It was frozen hard as a rock; I got nowhere with a knife, I couldn’t even get my meat saw to do the job, although in that case it was probably because in applying pressure with its teeth I only succeeded in melting the surface enough that they couldn’t ‘saw’.

So instead we had our usual fried eggs accompaniment, excellent, quite thick (precut) bacon from the same Amish farmers who had brought us their Pannhaas, straight from Lancaster County.  Although it was not a sacrifice, I’ll be trying again next Sunday, making some adjustments to my preparation plan.

• the ingredients that were assembled on the plate in the photograph above included thick bacon from Millport Dairy Farm, Cultured Pastured Butter from Organic Valley, a little bit of thinly-sliced scallion green from Norwich Meadows Farm, 6 Ameraucana chicken eggs from Millport Dairy Farm, freshly-ground black pepper, sea salt, Maldon sea salt for finishing, part of a crushed dried golden/orange habanada bought fresh from Norwich Meadows Farm last fall, 4 Backyard Farms Maine ‘cocktail tomatoes’ (from Maine, near Skowhegan) via Whole Foods Market, arugula and red-veined sorrel from Lani’s Farm, toasts of 3 different breads (an older organic whole wheat, and whole spelt flour ‘Levain’ from Bread Alone, a whole wheat Levain Boule from Our Daily Bread, also several days old, and a fresh Balthazar Bakery rye boule from Whole Foods Market)
• the music was Rossini’s ‘Stabat Mater’ (1832-1842), with soloists Cecilia Bartoli, Raúl Giménez, Roberto Scandiuzzi, and Luba Orgonasova, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera conducted by Myung-Whun Chung