Peg has a recipe for corn chowder that contained, in my humble opinion, far too many ingredients, required the making of a roux, opening a bunch of cans… Feh! So I went online, searched for corn chowder recipes, and kind of ORed them together to get to my recipe for corn chowder. Now, most of you that know me would think that I\’d opt for clam chowder, or fish chowder, or the entirely generic-sounding seafood chowder. Then again, those of you that know Peg know that seafood, in any way, shape, or manner, is completely out of the question. (I don\’t think she\’d even eat Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers…).
So tonight I made a batch:
- 12 oz of salt pork, diced. I\’d been using bacon, but Mom used salt pork.
- 2 small onions, diced
- 1 green bell pepper, diced
- 16 oz bag of frozen corn. It\’s January, and real corn is quite rare in New England. (even if it weren\’t rare, it would be dear, and I\’m just too cheap. A pound of frozen corn for 99 cents is right up my alley…)
- 8 medium potatoes, peeled and diced to about 3/8\” or so.
I rendered off the salt pork in a touch of olive oil. I always use olive oil when I cook. It\’s good for you.
Then I tossed in the onion and pepper and let that cook for a while, followed by the corn. I do fear that I put the corn in too early. It doesn\’t really need to cook as much as the onions and pepper.
The potatoes were covered in water, salted rather heavily, and put on the heat. After they boiled for a while I tested (e.g. tasted) for done. They were still a bit rare, but I drained off most of the cooking water, coarsely mashed some of the potatoes as a thickener, and returned everything to the pot, including the pork and vegetables.
Tomorrow (and this will be really good after clearing all of that snow that\’s coming), I\’ll take the pot out of the fridge, add about two cups of milk, a cup of light cream, and a dollop or three of butter, and bring it almost to a boil. It still needs some salt, I think.
Hope I have some oyster crackers.
Followup:
Turned out that this was quite salty. The 12 Oz of salt pork might be too much for this recipe. And I didn\’t really care for the salt pork so much – even diced up pretty small, there were chunks of it that were just fat. And Peg opined that the corn/potato ratio was too low. Otherwise it was pretty good, I thought. I saved the leftovers – though I might dilute the salty flavor with a bit of milk.
So the next batch will have a half-pound of bacon instead of 12 Oz of salt pork, and more corn.
