What the heck is Scrapple anyway?

Most Saturday mornings I wake up late and hungry. Today, was no exception. I was craving waffles and even the frigid temperatures and icy sidewalks were not going to stop me from finding some breakfast.

DC residents, especially of the young professional variety, love brunch. Breakfast is elevated to a social happening every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Though bottomless mimosas can make the occasional morning gathering gratifying, most weekends, I don't want to be forced to make reservations to be seated in an over-crowded, noisy restaurant, only to be rushed through my coffee and eggs (except most times I find myself scrambling to get out of the claustrophobia inducing crowds anyway).

Today's brunch experience is blogworthy because it was the exact opposite of the typical DC restaurant. Lincoln's Waffle Shop is located across the street from Ford's Theatre. Despite the fact that its location should make it a prime destination for famished tourists, my dining companion and I were seated as soon as we walked through the door (the weather might have been a contributing factor). The waitress greeted us as soon as we sat down at the communal counter. "Pass the ketchup, salt, pepper, etc... please" could be heard in our vicinity as we shared our condiments with out neighbors, who were both tourists and locals. The waitress handed us our menus and placed a cup of steaming coffee  in front of me within minutes. I felt as if I had been transported out of the nation's capital and into a nondescript roadside diner.

The communal seating areas at Lincoln's Waffle Shop.

The breakfast menu at Lincoln's Waffle Shop is pretty standard. My friend ordered a salmon cake that was served with a side of eggs, potatoes and toast. I ordered a waffle, of course, with a side of eggs and potatoes. Everything came out in under ten minutes.  The food was very ordinary and simple but sometimes that's exactly what I want. There were no frills, no fancy names requiring a dictionary, and absolutely zero pretensions. I know I will make my way back to Lincoln's Waffle Shop on another hungry weekend morning and I would recommend you do to! It feels like taking a roadtrip into the country without having to leave the city!

Our plates after we got done eating.

Unbeknownst to me, there exists a breakfast food called scrapple (at first I though it was a typo on the menu). According to a Wikipedia article headlined under the same name, scrapple is "a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and flour." I overlooked the unappetizing descriptions and decided to try it. What came out was a flattened, index card sized, brown square. It tasted faintly of sausage, but the texture made me wonder about all the scraps and trimmings the article referenced. After one bite I was done.

Now you know what scrapple is!

My Reveiw of Stephen King's Newest Book 11/22/63

A week ago, I finished reading Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63.  Jake Epping, the protagonist of this novel, is presented with a chance to travel back in time and save President Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet. Under the alias, George Amberson, Epping reluctantly slips out of his life in 2011 and enters 1958, where he plans to culminate his five year visit to the past by preventing John F. Kennedy assassination. Well meaning Epping, imagines that changing this single episode in history will eliminate much suffering and unhappiness, and as a result, the world, then onward, will be a better place.Although, he acknowledges at the beginning of his journey that the butterfly affect can have disastrous consequences on the present, Epping disregards this knowledge and interacts extensively with the past. He works, makes friends, and even falls in love.

The story Stephen King weaves in 11/22/63 is an unusual combination of sci-fi and history but Epping's human motivators and desires make this fantastical plot believable. Normally, I don't enjoy reading science-fiction, but I found myself drawn to the notion of time travel and the implications (not as positive as imagined) that changing history could have on the present.. In a clever twist that drives the plot, King creates an "obdurate" past resistant to alteration and in this way reinforces the aphorism that we cannot change the past but only learn from it. In fact, when Epping changes the past of Carolyn Poulin, a woman who lives to triumphantly overcome a handicap of a childhood accident, her life while unhampered by injury, becomes otherwise unspectacular. Through out the book, King stresses that "The multiple choices and possibilites of daily life are the music we dance to."

While I was captivated by the historical details of the novel(I learned more about Oswald from King's narrative than from any history teacher), and however tantalizing it was to discover King's hypothetical present created by changes in a documented past, what compelled me to keep turning the pages was the love story between Epping as Amberson and Sadie Dunhill.  Epping does not meet Sadie until page 338 of the 842 page tome but once she enters the story, she is a constant presence in Epping's life and therefore a pivotal character in the novel. Epping's unintentionally physical introduction to Sadie (he accidentally gropes her) is misleading and at first King had me believing that this initial closeness would lead to nothing more than friendship. Epping confirms this on page 346, when, shortly after this first encounter, he states "We didn't become lovers, but we became friends." Despite this assertion, Epping and Sadie do fall in love (the kind of love that transgresses the boundaries of time) and just as vehemently as he decries any possibility for romance at first, in one of my favorite quotes at the end of the book Epping states "But I believe in love, you know; love is uniquely portable magic, I don't think its in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind  and heart to heart." I never expected Stephen King, who I regarded as the R.L Steing of adult horror fiction, to be capable of creating such a poignant love story as the one between Epping and Sadie.

11/22/63 did not convert me into a diehard Stephen King fan but  I was well rewarded for the time I invested to reading this lengthy novel. From what I understand, 11/22/63  is a departure from Stephen King's usual style and themes. I imagine that this deviation could alienate some of his longtime followers but I believe that it can also broaden his fanbase, as readers who typically would not indulge in this genre of writing (Me!!) could really come to appreciate King's skillful storytelling.