Just made this tonight for the family dinner. This is a nice hearty and rich chowder that just about everyone loves!
Chicken Corn Chowder
1 tbs. oil
2 tbs. butter
1 cup of onions, diced
1 cup of celery, diced
3 tbs. flour
4 cups of chicken stock
3 cups of potatoes, diced
2 cups of carrots, cut into bite size pieces
3 cups of corn
3 cups of chicken meat, torn or cut into small pieces
4 slices of cooked bacon, crumbled
3 cups of cream
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
1 tsp sugar (optional)
Sauté onions and celery in the butter and oil. When vegetables are tender, stir in the flour to make a roux and let it cook for a minute or two to get the flour taste out. Add chicken stock and cook until slightly thickened. Add potatoes and carrots and let them cook until almost done. Add salt and pepper. When potatoes and carrots are almost cooked, add corn, chicken meat, and bacon. Simmer until corn is cooked and everything is heated through. Check seasonings and see if any additional salt or pepper is needed. If the corn is not particularly sweet I sometimes add the sugar here. If the corn is sweet, I skip the sugar. When I am just about ready to serve the chowder I add the cream, and bring it back up to serving temperature.
Serve with crackers, French bread, biscuits or corn bread and enjoy!
Variations: try substituting ham or turkey instead of the chicken (great for leftovers from thanksgiving).
Money saving notes: Whenever I cook a turkey or chicken I save the carcass, and all the bones with whatever meat is left on them that doesn’t slice off easily. I put it in the freezer in a zip lock bag. I sometimes have to break a turkey carcass in two and put it in two separate bags. I do the same with bones from any meat I cook. I also put any leftover meat that I am not going to use right away in zip lock bags in my freezer as well. Every so often I will pull out as many of one type of bone or carcass that I can fit in my big stock pot and boil it down to make stock. I strain the bones out of the stock and pull off the meat to use in soups, stews, and casseroles to stretch my food dollars. Leftover veggies like corn, peas, carrots, etc., can also be thrown in zip lock bags in the freezer, then when I make soup, I have a variety of veggies I can just throw in at the last minute and heat through.
I like the sounds of your recipe...I plan to try it. I make a mean corn chowder and like to use cream corn [canned] b/c of the extra good flavor. Do you think cream corn would work ok in your recipe?
Neat trick I saw on Alton Brown’s show about stocks.
He will put the chicken stock, etc. into muffin tins (reg. are 1/2 cup) and in the freezer to freeze - pops them out and throws them in a ziplock bag. Perfect for recipes that call for a certain amount of stock.
I haven’t bought cans of chicken broth in months!
We had chicken tonight, after a couple of more meals that carcass is going into the pot - I am low on stock.