Maribou asked me to make her some corn chowder in the crockpot and I looked up the ingredients and said “sure” and put everything together, not expecting a whole lot. I mean, I figured that it was a chowder, which means that it’s somewhere halfway between “stew” and “soup” and while I am not opposed to either, it’s almost summertime and soup is more of a winter thing.
So I threw it together and didn’t bother getting pictures because, hey, why write about something that I’m going to have one bowl of and then shrug?
Well, I was wrong. This stuff is pretty good.
Let’s start with the recipe and then I can tell you about it:
2 cans (14 1/2 ounces each) chicken broth
1 bag (16 ounces) frozen corn, thawed
3 small red potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 stalk celery, sliced
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 cup heavy cream
8 slices bacon, crisp-cooked and crumbled
Throw everything *EXCEPT* the cream and bacon into the crockpot and cook it low and slow for 8 hours. Then add the cream and bacon and stir and serve.
That’s not how we did it. We use Better Than Boullion instead of broth and we left out the onion and black pepper. Also, instead of the frozen corn, we just got a huge shipment of corn in and the grocery store is practically giving it away and so instead of using frozen, we used fresh.
Now, as I prepared the soup, I realized that I was writing an essay in my head despite myself. Here are some of the paragraphs I wrote:
Why in the world did I go for fresh instead of a bag of frozen? Here’s the prep for the corn using a bag of frozen:
1. open bag
2. dump contents of bag into crockpot
3. dispose empty bag into garbage
See? That’s it! What was *I* doing? Shucking corn, trying to get all of the corn silk, busting out the cutting board and the knife, cutting the corn as close to the cob as I could creating a *LOT* of mess, and doing that TEN FREAKIN TIMES!!! And then you have a huge mess to clean up!
DON’T BE LIKE ME. DON’T BE AN IDIOT AND THINK THAT IT’S BETTER TO USE FRESH CORN!!!
But when I made a bowl for Maribou the first thing she told me was “Wow! The corn is really great!” so… maybe it’s worth it. But, seriously, as I was making it I thought to myself “why in the heck did I not just get the frozen bag of corn?”
So I’m not going to say that you should definitely eat the frozen instead of fresh. But if you can get someone else to make it, have them use fresh.
Anyway, as I was throwing the ingredients into the crockpot, I found myself wondering “what in the heck is the difference between a chowder and a soup or a stew anyway?” I mean, I was throwing chicken schmaltz and corn and potatoes into a pot and it felt like making soup and not like making chowder. It’s not the presence of clams, this was fully a corn chowder. It’s not the presence of cream, because everybody has at least one horror story involving Manhattan Clam Chowder. They seem to think that it dates back to the French word “chaudière”, for “cauldron”.
So chowder is made in a cauldron, soup is made in a pot. There you go.
This chowder is made in a slow cooker.
I’m seriously impressed by this stuff. You should make it. Though you can be forgiven for thinking “maybe I’ll wait for October and use the frozen”.
This weekend is a 3-Day! Woo hoo! We’ve got a game night planned and maybe some grilling planned and, wowsers, this is the first day off since President’s Day. Maybe I’ll do nothing on one of the days off. Wouldn’t *THAT* be nice.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Chowder”. Photo taken by the author.)
No clams or clam juice? Looks serviceable and fresh sweet corn is always better than… just about anything else in the whole entire world.
A couple months ago I saw some pre-processed crab in a container at Costco. I looked at it, and by golly, it looked like large intact crab meat, not stringy scraps. So we gambled on the container’o’crab and made crab-cakes… they were as good as I’ve ever made.
Moral of the story? Sometimes the pre-processed stuff isn’t half bad. But usually the fresh ‘extra-step’ stuff is just plain better.
…fresh sweet corn is always better than… just about anything else in the whole entire world.
Indeed. For three summers when I was in college I worked at an ag field lab complex. The lab where I worked didn’t have a garden, but the next lab over had a large one — it’s what they did — and we had permission to walk through and pick things (on a small scale). I was living with my parents those summers, and would sometimes check everyone’s calendar and then tell them, “On Tuesday I’ll pick sweet corn, ride home on my motorcycle, husk it and have it ready to go in the steamer no more than an hour after I picked it.” It’s amazing how rapidly sugars get converted to starches from the moment you pick the corn.
The one thing I still miss about Monmouth County New Jersey after living in Colorado for almost 40 years is being able to go to lunch at hole-in-the-wall places where the seafood was caught last night and came off the boat this morning.
Yes, it’s interesting how a lot of food has a particular excellence that is only available for a short period after harvest.
A million years ago, Michael Kinsley had a fun column at Slate where he talked about the Martha Stewart phenomenon where you could work twice as hard on something and make it 10% better but his theory was that you could also work half as hard on something and get something about 75% as good. The “throw it in a blender and hit purée” theory.
I was definitely considering it halfway through the second ear.
As for the clams, unfortunately, I have been afflicted with a shellfish allergy. It’s not “go into anaphylactic shock” serious, just “cough twice, get headache, spend next six hours in foul mood” serious and, as such, I put up with Maribou’s food requirements and she puts up with mine.
Corn chowder, no clams, no black pepper.
Sigh. (Though I put some on mine, you know, after it’s bowled.)
The thing that impresses me are the Chefs who work 75% as hard for results 100% better. The right equipment, experience and education.
Too bad about the shellfish issues; I have a couple of food disagreements, but nothing I can’t power through once in a while. Oddly my wife one day out of the blue in her 40s developed a very strong peanut aversion — not the dangerous kind — but actual nausea and stomach turning kind. Was weird because she had liked and eaten peanuts all her life, then blammo… no more.
Butter, heavy whipping cream, more salt than you’d ever even consider using at home…
Well sure that, but what I’m really talking about are all the professional techniques that sometimes only make sense if you’re dealing with 100 ears of corn vs. 3.
Like, somewhere in Manhattan there’s a prep cook being berated by a line cook for not knowing that first you heat the corn in a circulation bath at EXACTLY 97.7 degrees, then you shock them in an iced sodium bi-carbonate solution of 4.3 grams per litre and then you put them in a extremely diluted solution of distilled white vinegar (not red, not apple — we’re not making a marinade you chud) … and as everone knows, if you do this the kernals are firmed, the sugars concentrated and the fibers are losened from the cob and the follicles gently give up with hardly a pull.
And… we have the corn machine over there that looks like a fruit press with 5 apple corers rigged on it with tack welds — because that’s what it is. You should be done in 20 minutes and on to the next ingredient.
Too much prep for 3-ears — but that’s how you feed 200 people one background component of a single dish.
*do not try this at home… but if you do and it works, I totally knew it would.
Two cheats that I can recommend without guilt:
USE THE BROILER. OH MY GOSH USE THE BROILER!!! It’s a restaurant-quality salamander in your house! Melt the cheese, bring oils to the surface of your meats, toast the breads that are too big for the toaster (that sourdough in the picture was toasted under the broiler).
If the recipe asks for lemon juice or lime juice or orange juice, bust out your reamer. Don’t just add the juice, add the pulp. The more pulp the better.
Whilst listening to “I Was Wrong” by The Sisters of Mercy, the youtubes reminded me that “Osmosis Jones” was free to watch.
It’s one of those movies that I can recommend to folks who haven’t seen it. It’s half-cartoon, half-live-action that deals with a slovenly zookeeper who catches a virus while dealing with the aftermath of becoming a widower.
Okay, maybe not half. Maybe 20% of the movie deals with Bill Murray, the zookeeper. The rest of the movie is a cartoon that takes place inside of his body where a white blood cell and a cold medicine capsule both take on Thrax, a virus carried on a hard-boiled egg stolen by a monkey under Bill Murray’s charge.
Yes, I saw it in the theater.
I remember thinking “this movie is so dumb” for the first half of the movie and thinking “this movie was really good” for the last 10%.
So if you’ve got an evening to kill, check it out.