Children of the Corn Chowder

 

We’re constantly told that the best way to cook is to use what’s in season, and for the summer, that’s certainly corn. Sweet and fresh… just don’t ask me to harvest it!   He wants you too, Malachi!

This was our first time buying fresh corn from the store. It feels like you’re buying a huge amount, but so much of it is inedible.  Not many other vegetables quite like it.

We were inspired to make this corn chowder recipe but with an added twist that we took from this recipe.

Plenty of shucking.  I am not jiving, sir.

Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your…..corn!     (Though I was going to say “ears,” didn’t you?  Don’t anticipate!)

First we sliced off the kernels with a knife into a large bowl.  I’m not sure if you can tell in this picture, but we’ve placed a smaller bowl upside down at the bottom.  This makes it a little easier to cut since it elevates the corn off the bottom and gives it a stable place to rest whilst slicing.

 

At this point we’ve taken off all the good stuff.  But wait, there’s more!  There’s still some good corn flavor in there.  We used the back of a butter knife to scrape away at the cob in order to get all the pulp and excess water out of there.  This turns out to be really messy because there is a LOT of water in that corn.  You can’t tell, but there are splattered bits of corn juice all over our kitchen at this point.

Mmm…pulpy.  This is not hardcore.

We put the pulp in a dish towel and squeezed it in order to extract the corn juice. 

Then we can get to work on the rest of the ingredients:  red potatoes, onions, bacon, and some herbaceous herbs.  The modelo is for another recipe…. yeah, that’s it!

First step is browning the onion and bacon with some thyme, salt, and pepper.  Then you add a little flour to make a quick roux.

Water, corn, and potatoes go in and cook for about 15 minutes. 

After it’s good and cooked, about half of the soup goes in the blender.  Blending it helps thicken the soup, but we only did half of it so that we would still have a nice chunky chowder.

The puree goes back in the pot along with a little bit of half-and-half to make it creamy.  We also added that corn juice we extracted before.  Can’t get enough of that corn flavor!

This would be the end of our blog post, but naturally we wanted to take it one step further and add a jalapeno-pesto to the soup to give it that extra kick of specialness.  Here we’ve roasted up some jalapenos under the broiler.  If we had done this in a smoker, we would call these chipotles.  But alas, they are merely roasted jalapenos.

After roasting them, it’s a cinch to remove their skins leaving us with a very soft jalapeno pulp.

Here’s some parsley, garlic, the roasted jalapenos, lime juice, and olive oil.  A couple spins in the blender and you’ve got pesto!

The soup so nice, they garnished it twice!  While we stole the jalapeno puree garnish idea from another recipe, we also had the fresh basil garnish that the original called for.  The more fresh herbs the better, believe me!  Once you stir that puree into the chowder, it gets a nice spicy kick.  Jalapenos, corn, and bacon?  What could be better!

Let Us Rap about Lettuce Wraps

 

We’ve been spending most our lives                                                                                             Living in a Lettuce Wrap Paradise.                                                                                                                                                        Word, to your respective Mothers.

-LL Lettuce RapZ

Ah lettuce!  Or as its known at P.F. Changs:  the Chinese tortilla.  I’m pretty sure Mao ate lettuce wraps all the time.  That, and fortune cookies.  See, lettuce wraps are great because you can take anything and wrap it in lettuce and… bam!  It’s healthy!

Well, in this case, its mostly true!  We made Chicken Sausage Lettuce Wraps using a recipe we found in Bon Appetit Magazine, a solid food publication with some stellar photography.  This recipe is shockingly easy and very tasty.  It basically involves buying ground chicken, mixing it with minced garlic, minced ginger (a Chez Venza customization), sliced serrano, flour, and Asian condiments.  

After chilling for a bit, you pan fry and you’re done.

The recipe calls this “Chicken Sausage,” and it is in the most basic sense.  But this is no more a sausage than a hamburger is.  In fact, my brain wheels are already turning on making an Asian-flavored chicken burger based on this recipe.  It is that tasty.

Now, a quick word on “Asian condiments.”  We’ve done several Asian and Asian-style recipes at this point, and we’ve managed to acquire modest quantities of the various strange pre-made sauces that one has to have.  They are all unusual, inscrutable, and basically mandatory.  Fish Sauce, Oyster Sauce, Black Bean Sauce, Hoisin Sauce, and Ketchup (yup).  No real idea how any of these are made (except that fish sauce ferments outdoors for like a year or something… should we try making our own?) You basically have to have these premade items in order to make most recipes I’ve seen.  In what other cuisine is this done to this extent?  I suppose its like a Westerner always having mustard or mayonnaise on hand.

Back to our recipe!

A quick combination of serrano pepper, fish sauce, lime juice, and sugar makes a sticky, spicy, tart dressing for our wraps.

This recipe is a winner, folks.  Easy.  Quick.  Full of flavor.  Be sure to double the recipe, cause you’ll eat them up real fast!