Corn Chowder

Chowder is not available in regular restaurants here. We get corn soup in steak house. Corn soup is normally creamy corn cooked in broth, starched, placed in the all-you-can-eat section of the steak house. We may always go for pricey restaurants and get a set of meal with a choice of either salad or soup. That would be a nice choice, but definitely not something I’d like to do on a regular basis.

 

I searched on youtube, and found a recipe that I really like. And according to the video, corn chowder is surprisingly easy to make. All ingredients are readily available in grocery store here. I always feel that the starch used in the corn soup here is like a thick makeup on a woman’s face. It tastes good, but the starch makes it harder to actually enjoy the flavor of the corn, and am really happy with this startch-free chowder.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of chopped onion
• 1 cup of diced potato
• 1 tsp of olive oil
• 1 cup of milk
• 0.5 can of creamy corn
• salt and pepper

Heat the pan and saute onion with olive oil until it is golden brown. Put onion and potato in a sauce pan, add half a cup of water, and simmer all the ingredients for 15 minutes until potato is cooked and tender.

Then add creamy corn and milk to the sauce pan. Heat the whole thing until milk is warm enough to taste. Add salt and pepper. Serve with cracker and ice tea.

I used low fat milk, so the chowder is a bit watery. Not bad. The video said half-and-half could be used if creamier soup is desired. Cream is expensive here, as we do not have big dairy industry in Taiwan; however, I’ll get a litre of cream sometime and probably use half a cup of milk and half a cup of cream instead, and see how it turns out. I have to, of course, come up with something else to finish up the cream before it goes bad.

The original recipe also calls for bacon grease to saute the onion and chopped bacons placed on top of the soup. I did without the bacon part, and it turns out just as nice. I love this recipe, and am sure that I’ll use this recipe a lot this winter.