J’s family owns a cabin in Canada, where all our boy friends go every year to shoot airsoft guns and eat meats and be manly. This year, they invited the girls. This also meant a lot of very serious questioning, ‘can you eat meat? can you shoot guns? you realize we’ll be shooting guns. and we’ll smell.’
We went anyway. We ate meat. We shot guns. We smelled (pretty).
And we made delicious foods, including my new favorite recipe: Corn Chowder!
Corn chowder is easy peasy, it just takes a long time because you have to chop so much stuff. You can chop the veggies as small or large as you prefer. I chopped my veggies large, mostly because I’m lazy, but also because (as in ice cream) I like my foods chunky.
So chop up: 2 medium sweet onions, 2 medium carrots, 2 stalks celery, 1 red bell pepper, 2 medium potatoes (I chopped these a little bigger, and they sort of melted down as they cooked which added a nice thickness to the soup), 6 ears of corn off the cob (I grilled the corn the day before), and about 3 or 4 strips of cooked bacon chopped into small pieces.
In a large soup pot, melt a little olive oil or butter and add the onion and stir about until the onion is soft, about 8-10 minutes. Then pour in 5 cups of reduced sodium chicken broth (I made my own, but it’s generally easier to buy it), the carrots, celery, pepper, and potatoes, and the leafy bits from 3 de-sprigged twigs of thyme. Allow to simmer until potatoes are soft, about 15-20 minutes. Stir in the corn and 1 cup heavy cream. Simmer uncovered for 10 more minutes, adding pepper and salt to taste.
Here’s also the point where K had a super suggestion. We had a small leftover hot pepper from the night before, which we hoped would add some much needed kick to the chowder. But I didn’t want those super potent hot pepper seeds floating around in my soup, giving shocks to unsuspecting sippers. So I took a fine mesh strainer and put the halved pepper in it, then lowered the strainer in so that the pepper was in the soup, but easy to strain out. That way, we could monitor the spiciness, and remove the pepper when the soup had achieved ideal heat. It took about five minutes, and then we lifted the strainer out with its heated pepper and all the offending seeds.
Finally, you sprinkle in the magic… bippity boppity bacon!
Ta-da!
I made the soup in the early afternoon while the boys were outside making up zombie scenarios for gun games. We let it cool on the stove then heated it up again about six hours later for dinner. I think the added hours allowed the soup to really mingle its flavors, and I’m convinced that the soup is the better for it. But it was also quite tasty at 2 pm, which would have also been a fine hour for soup, had it not also been such a perfect hour for waterskiing, fish spearing, and painting.
