A Great Corn Nuggets Recipe – Delicious Southern Fried Cooking

When I was 15, my dad got a job with a regional accounting firm and we had to move away from Tampa, where I was born and raised, to our new home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Now, the move from Tampa to Fayetteville was culture shock enough, but the real problem (insofar as I saw it through my bratty teenage eyes, anyway) was the neighborhood we moved to.

I’m sure there are many wonderful, modern communities in Fayetteville, but Greenview Shores was not among them. To call it a “neighborhood” is probably stretching the definition of the term – it was little more than a handful of connected streets in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. I’ll never forget pulling onto what was to be our new road, looking around at all of the ramshackle houses surrounding us, and thinking, “Do they have phone service out here? Running water?”

We had officially arrived in The Sticks.

Once I put my big city snobbery away, though, I came to enjoy our time in Greenview Shores. I never saw anything that would have earned it that lofty title – there was a nearby retention pond, but come on – but I did encounter some of the friendliest people I’d ever met. Ever would meet, for that matter. One of them was our neighbor, Craig, an old Army vet who walked with a faint limp. One day he came to our house with a huge Tupperware bowl filled with a treat he called “corn nuggets.” I was pretty skeptical about this culinary adventure; then again, as a 15-year-old girl obsessed with the bathroom scale, I was pretty skeptical about all fried foods. Once I tried one, though, there was no going back. If anything was worth the calories, this was it.

Once I started getting into my own kitchen adventures as an adult, I decided to give corn nuggets a whirl. I don’t know if I ever improved on those first ones I had, but they’re pretty damn good.

As long as you’re not a snob about it, of course.

Non-Snobbish Corn Nuggets

Here’s what you’ll need to make this southern delight:

– 1 cup of creamed corn

– The white of one egg

– A half-cup of yellow cornmeal

– A quarter cup of milk

– 12 ounces of drained corn

– 2/3 cup of all-purpose flour

– Frying oil (vegetable works for this household)

– Salt

– Pepper

Once you’ve assembled your ingredients, go ahead and mix your two types of corn together in a big bowl. Line a baking pan with foil, coat it with oil (or spray it with Pam), and use it as a surface to mold your corn mixture into small balls. Once this is done, pop the pan into the freezer for 3 hours or so to help the balls firm up. Once they’re ready to go, heat a deep frying skillet until the vegetable oil reaches a temperature of 350 degrees. Meanwhile, mix together your cornmeal, milk, egg white, and flour, and sprinkle in some salt and pepper. Take each of your frozen nuggets, dip them into this newly-made batter, and then fry them in the skillet until they’ve reached that perfect golden-brown hue. Lay them aside on a paper towel, and soon you’ll have a treat worth singing about!