Corn Chowder

For Summer, who I love dearly, this is my special recipe for Corn Chowder - or at least what I can remember of it - I do it slightly different every time.



I poached 6 skinless chicken thighs in chicken broth, and then cut them up into bite sized pieces and reserved the liquid for the soup - but, you could just use a roast chicken you bought at the store, or some leftover chicken from whenever. Just end up with bite-sized pieces of mostly-cooked chicken, and you're good.

After you deal with the chicken, I take three strips of bacon, dice them up, and cook them in a dry, hot pan, with one large diced sweet onion. Maybe fifteen minutes? So that everything's melting away and smelling fabulous, and add another large diced onion and two diced red peppers. Add salt and pepper at this point, or it'll never taste right. Three minutes just to get them soft, and then add about four cups of chicken broth (if you poached your own chicken, use the stock from that - but strain out all the gross chicken flotsam bits), the diced chicken, and three peeled, diced russet potatoes.

Simmer that for at least fifteen minutes. Probably more. Try thirty. You want to get the potatoes all the way cooked through - but if you diced them small enough (I like to aim for a cubic centimeter. Which makes me sound like a dork. But I really do aim for that.), then it shouldn't take all that long. You can pretty much stall the soup indefinitely at this point - say, if your husband is thinking he'll be home at 8, but doesn't actually get home until 10, this is the point at which to pause.

When you're about 15 minutes from eating, pour a full bag of sweet white corn (Frozen. The sweet white corn is the best. Not the big yellow corn. Little.), and this time I also had a random half bag of larger yellow corn, and so I dumped that in, two, and the contrast between the two was nice. To add some richness, I added a quarter cup of heave cream, and stirred it in well. And then a whole bunch of fresh basil, chiffonaded.

We served the chowder this time with a HUGE loaf of whole wheat sourdough that my friends brought over:



And I snipped some chives and threw them on top. I wish I'd taken a picture of the
finished product in a bowl, but hey, we all make mistakes.