Spicy Chicken Corn Chowder

I love chowder.

New England Clam and any sort of Corn will suffice. (But screw that unnatural Manhattan!)

After my trip to Williams-Sonoma yesterday, with frankly the sole purpose of buying a soup cookbook, I gathered the ingredients and threw together the Spicy Corn Chowder in the book. Now if you know me, I cannot just follow along, I must individualize it. It needs chicken. Dammit, it needs chicken. So, during my barbecued turkey breast smoking whilst brewing beer, I threw on two chicken breasts for the soup.

The goods: one yellow onion, one jalapeno, two potatoes, one stalk of celery (I despise celery, and the fact that you HAVE to buy it in huge stalks annoys me, so I used one teaspoonful of ground celery seed instead), one teaspoonful of roasted minced garlic (found in those tiny jars), 4 cups of milk, 1 cup of heavy cream, three cups of corn, 3 strips of bacon, and a sprinkling of red pepper flakes. Oh yeah, and those two cooked chicken breasts.

In a food processor, pulse the quartered yellow onion, the seeded jalapeno, the celery seed, and the roasted minced garlic:

Cut the strips of bacon then crisp it for 5 minutes max in the large soup pot (mmmm, and it's the double smoked thick bacon from the German Gourmet in Alexandria, VA too):

Remove the bacon then saute the onion/jalapeno/celery/garlic in the bacon grease for a few minutes to brown it up.

Add the peeled potatoes (cubed bite size), cooked chicken (cut bite size), milk, and heavy cream. Bring to a boil then cut the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes or until the potatoes are fork-tender.

Now add the bacon and the corn. All that delicious corn. That succulent corn. That orgasmic corn.

Simmer it for 5 more minutes or until the corn is tender. Then, with a slotted spoon, remove two cups/16oz/5oomL of solids. With an immersion blender, a regular blender, or a food processor, puree these solids well. Reintroduce the puree to the pot and add the red pepper flakes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Then just continue to simmer until it's serving time. It will indeed need some salt, how much is up to you. Tasting it before any S&P, I thought it just needed a little "boost".

Holy crap. Delicioso. And relatively quick to prepare. A new Gordonian staple. The jalapeno gives a bit of insidious heat in the throat. Nothing overtly HOT, but you know it's there. If you're adverse to a warm mouth and gullet, I suppose you could eliminate the jalapeno, or go with a milder heat pepper. Me? This rocks as it is.

Try it.

And in the immortal words of Lois Griffin, "Who wants chowder?"