Corn and Potato Chowder

One of my cooking goals is to get a good cookbook and make every recipe in it…

..so for Christmas I got a cookbook…and a nice knife set.  🙂

Original Recipe

• 2 cups peeled, diced Yukon gold potatoes (about 2 cups)
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 (10-ounce) package frozen diced onion, red and green bell pepper and celery
• 1 cup chopped yellow onion
• 2 cups milk
• 1 (12-ounce) can evaporated milk
• 1 (11-ounce) can yellow and white whole kernel corn, drained
• 1(10 3/4 ounce) can of cream of mushroom soup with roasted garlic
• 1/2 cup thinly sliced green onions
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
• 1 to 2 teaspoons hot sauce
• salt and pepper to taste
• (extra) 3 cloves minced garlic

I really didn’t know what I wanted to cook for my first recipe so while going through the DVD that came with the cookbook they had a few menu plans set up.  I wanted to start with something simple and different than what I normally eat.  I’ve had clam chowder in the past (tastes great with parmesan cheese) but never corn chowder.  I’ll provide the original recipe, but since I’m trying to cut out as much processed food as I can I made some changes.  I’ll make note of those changes as I go.

Let’s get started!

The grocery store I went to didn’t have Yukon gold potatoes so I used russet instead.  Bring them to a boil in a Dutch oven until they’re tender.  About 10-15 minutes.  Drain and set them aside in a large bowl.

I LOVE garlic, so even though the cream of mushroom soup had garlic in it I decided to add more by mincing three garlic cloves and sauteing them in the butter over medium high heat.  About a minute or so is good.  Just until the garlic starts to brown a bit.

Now instead of buying a package of vegetables I decided to chop my own.  After chopping one green and red bell pepper, 1/2 an onion and a bunch of celery stalks (refer to main picture at the top of the post), I discovered that I only needed about 1/2 a green and red bell pepper, 1/4 chopped onion and 1/2 the bunch of celery stalks to get the ten ounces I needed for the recipe.  What did I do with the rest?  Add it to the recipe?  No, of course not.  I juiced them later.  I will have to work my way up to vegetable juicing to say the least.  Anywho…

I chopped up another cup of onion (I used a white onion both times because it’s what I already had on hand) and sauteed it with the other vegetables in the garlic butter and let it simmer.  The recipe says 6 to 8 minutes or until tender.  I did a little clean up while cooking then proceeded to the next step.  I like crunchy vegetables.

Add milk, corn, evaporated milk, cream of mushroom soup, green onions, parsley, hot sauce and potatoes.

Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to medium low and let simmer for about 15 minutes until heated through.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Let stand for about 1o minutes.  Here I did the rest of my clean up and by the time I was done it was ready.

This was delicious!  Something I can definitely see myself cooking again.  There are some changes I would make however:

• More garlic.  Instead of three cloves of garlic I will use 6 or 7.  I had to add garlic powder at the end and I really didn’t want to.
• I got a salt and pepper grinder for Christmas and the salt didn’t bring out the flavor enough.  I wound up having to use more in order to bring out the flavor and still it wasn’t quite right.  Since you need the iodine anyway I’ll just use up the salt that I have and have two pepper grinders.  lol
• I want to add more vegetables like carrots and peas.  And maybe a meat.  Cubed chicken sounds nice.
• Going with my less processed route, I want to make my own cream of mushroom soup…which calls for chicken stock…which means I’ll be continuing to buy organic for a while.

Hope you enjoy making this as much as I did.  It was a lot of fun, especially with my new knife set.  Cutting was a breeze.

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