chicken corn chowda – combat dreary with dairy!

it’s cloudy, it’s cold, it’s windy, it’s off-n-on rainy and it’s november. it’s also a night where I have some hours with just the catties, and I always feel that time is best spent making food. it’s doubly rewarding to have a nice hot meal ready for when pony comes home from work.
we had a couple ears of corn in the fridge on the verge of not being so great anymore, so soup was the obvious choice. and while corn chowder is nice, I think it’s even nicer with chicken or turkey. tonight I used turkey because they had big ol’ leg/thigh combos on at the store for super cheap. inexpensive dark meat? sign me up!

also, before I get to the good part, I feel I need to honestly say that I absolutely used two recipes on foodnetwork to figure out how I wanted to attempt this meal. one was paula’s which I used as a guide for ingredients, and the other was tyler’s, which I used more for the method… though mine is different from both in the end. often when I’ve never made something before, or haven’t made it in a long time, I’ll seek out some recipes as a refresher or rough guide, then adjust to my own taste.
okok, on with the good show:

a good wooden spoon of butter (maybe 1/3 C? maybe 1/2 C?)
1 tbsp oil
1 small onion, diced
3 sticks of celery, diced
1 leek, cut in half and sliced into thin semi-circles (I could do a whole post on how to clean/cut leeks, so look it up if you’re not sure)
3-5 cloves of garlic, minced
a good glurg of white wine (say, 1/3-1/2 C)
1 tsp dijon mustard
several cracks of black pepper
thyme – 4 sprigs chopped, or 1 1/2 tsp of the dry stuff
3 C chicken stock (or veg if you wanna do this meat-free)
chicken or turkey, cooked and shredded – for turkey, a leg and thigh was lots. for chicken, 8 or 10 thighs… or 4 thighs and 2 breasts maybe
5-6 medium-sized new potatoes, cut into bite-size chunks
3 ears of corn or 3ish C frozen corn
1 zucchini, sliced into semi circles
2 C whipping cream
1/3 C flour or cornstarch

. a couple hours before you want to make soup, crank yer oven to 375 and get your chicken/turkey in there (in an uncovered dish with pepper and poultry seasoning on it) and bake for an hour. let it cool and then begin your soup!

. chuck the butter and oil in a big pot on medium-low heat
. add the onion, celery, leek and garlic. let these get all glossy, but not brown. stir every couple of minutes
. when the veg is translucent and lovely, add the thyme, pepper, mustard and wine. allow to simmer for a few minutes
. add the chicken/turkey, potatoes and chicken stock. slap a lid on it and let it simmer for a good half hour

. meanwhile, if you’ve got corn still on the cob, get it off. the easiest way I know is the guy fieri way (what a FN heavy post this is): get two bowls, one really big, the other small and with a flat bottom. tip the small bowl upside down into the big bowl. rest one end of corn on the smaller bowl and use a big knife to carve off the niblets in one motion. as you do this, the corn falls into the big bowl, and not all over your counter. happy days!
. add the corn  and zucchini to the soup mix and let simmer for ten minutes
. in a big cup or bowl or something, whisk the flour/starch into the cream until it’s all smooth. pour this into the soup and stir constantly as you do to avoid lumps (especially if you’re using corn starch)

. if it’s too thick, add a little milk to thin it out, or some more chicken stock
. let everything come up to a gentle boil and then shut ‘er down. it’s all done, and in the most fabulous of ways!
. serve it nice and hot with some really nice buttered bread and a green salad or all by it’s thick, creamy, hearty self

also, if you wanted to get really decadent, you could add 2 C grated cheddar and 1/4 C chopped green chilis or pickled jalapeños just before serving. so much savour, so much flavour!

uke-lady thanks giving pyrohy

my absolute favourite thing to contribute is food; that should be fairly obvious. what you may not know is that my favourite food to contribute to any big holiday meal, is perogies, pyrohy in ukrainian… of which I am descended from on both sides of my family. I didn’t grow up with any particular ethnic culture, but had a few little things around the house that symbolized the heritage my parents had to show they were proud: painted easter eggs, pysanky, a tiny traditionally painted vase, and a very special book: Traditional Ukrainian Cookery by Savella Stechishin.

This book was given to my mom by my dad, with an inscription referring to it as a ‘cookski bookski.’ within these hallowed pages was/is a recipe so good, so fantastically awesome that I can’t keep it to myself. PYROHY – the most heartwarming, stomach pleasing, happy-fun-time-dumpling EVER. My absolute favourite food, yep, I love them even more than macaroni.

unlike so many others, I follow this recipe exactly, so I felt it unnecessary to retype it for you here. Rather, a photo of the real thing!
BUT, before you make the dough, you need to allot yourself a good three hours or so to making these overwhemlingly lovely little bastards. simply put, it’s worth it… so make lots. I make triple the amount of dough the recipe calls for.

so, either the morning of or the night before you want to make pyrohy, you need some nice russet potatoes. I like russet because when you mash them, they stay super fluffy and don’t need any butter or cream. you could use other potatoes, which I also did this afternoon because I was short on russets, but cook them separately. in the below picture, you can kinda see the difference in texture. I used the more gluey ones for the dough and it worked like a charm!

For the filling… for my filling you will need:
10 LARGE russet potatoes
3-4 C grated sharp cheddar, the older the better… but not, you know, moldy
2 tsp table salt

. boil potatoes as you normally would for mashing
. drain and then dump back into pot
. put salt cheese on top and then lid on top to steam the cheese all melty
. mash
. set aside to cool, or if you’re doing this the night before, cool and then refrigerate

when the potatoes have cooled, start on the dough recipe pictured above. Keep in mind, the filling guide above is for triple the dough, so if you only want to make a few, make much less filling.

. when your dough is nicely put together and has had a nice rest, divide it into three balls (or don’t if you’re doing the single batch)
. lightly flour your rolling/cutting surface
. put a big pot of water on high, so when you’ve got a few pyrohy ready, you can just put them in to boil while you fill more. it’s efficient
. take one of the balls and squish it down a bit with your hand on the rolling surface, let’s say, the counter
. keep in mind this is a fairly elastic dough, like a very rich pasta, so no matter how you roll it, it will spring back a little, which is good
. roll the dough to the thinness shown below… I don’t know how thin that is in numbers. basically, thick enough to have some stretch for the filling process, but thin enough so that the pyrohy isn’t all dough with a little potato

. with a sharp knife, cut the dough into squares… or rectangular triangle shapes. I like it rustic, so there are no glasses or cookie cutters used here for perfect little semicircle nonsense

. take one of the dough-shapes and grab a bit of filling as such:

. not too much, but maybe a little more than you think would fit in one. pull all the edge together in whatever way you find easiest. just folding them over, or with the trickier looking pieces (long triangles) fold them more like a samosa. whatever you choose, make sure to cut off the excess bits of dough that gather where you’ve pinched it all together. I also like to kind of reshape them a bit with my hands so they’re somewhat compact

. when you’ve got 4 or 5 done, gently place them in the pot of boiling water. after a minute or so, give them a stir to make sure they’re not stuck to the bottom. also, never crowd them: max 5 per pot, and if they’re biggins, only 2. trust me

. grab a cookie sheet that has edges and a wire cooling rack
. when they have floated to the top of the water and are circling about, they’re ready to come out. gently place them on the cooling rack so the water can drip/steam off them and they can cool for 10 minutes

. when they’re cool enough to handle, very lightly coat them with oil so you can put them in a big casserole dish or roasting pan without them all sticking together

. when it comes time to cooking them, I like to COAT them in onion butter, which goes like this:

1 big ol’ yellow onion, grated
1 lb. unsalted butter, cut into meltable pieces

. in a pot over low heat, chuck in the butter and grated onion
. let this simmer away until the solids of the butter come to the top and it absolutely reeks on onion
. pour this all over the pyrohy, and maybe set a little aside for pouring on at dinner iffin you like
cover the pyrohy with tin foil or a lid, and bake at 350 until heated all the way through. keep in mind they’re already cooked, and shouldn’t stay in the oven so long that they get tough or leathery

it’s a lot of work, but I think to make these twice a year for thanks giving and xmas is a pretty fabulous treat for you and whoever you’re feeding. funny, these are normally an easter thing for ukrainians, but being a ukrainian canadian without much schooling in traditional ways, I do them this way for the people I love.

the satisfaction of new from old – food

I derive an epic amount of satisfaction from making something terribly tasty from leftovers. you’ll always need to invest a little more, but it’s so worth it. BAM masher soup. Also, there’s no photo, because it’s a truly ugly looking soup, not quite as bad as french canadian pea soup, but still. let’s just say it tastes miles better than it looks.

1 tbsp butter and a glurg of oil
1/3 of an onion diced fine
1 stick of celery also finey fine
1 or 2 mediumish carrots cut to thumbnail size
a few shakes each of garlic powder, poultry seasoning, thyme, cracked black pepper
1 round tsp of chicken bouillion
1 bay leaf
1/4 C white wine
any leftover gravy you may have
2 C mashed potatoes
1-3 potatoes (depending on their size) sliced into thin discs
water

. get a goodly sized pot on medium low heat. put the oils in and melt them together
. add the onion, carrot, celery and spices. when they start to get glossy, add the bay leaf, left over gravy and wine. cook off
. add the mash, boillion and water. stir, cover and simmer on low for twenty or so minutes
. add the sliced potatoes and continue to simmer until the slices are tender

butter up some bread or biscuits and tuck in
also, please, stray from the outline here and experiment. I don’t actually measure anything I cook (the baking, I do for obvious reasons) but prefer to go by my nose and tastebuds. throw in some diced tomato or spinach or peas. maybe substitute regular potatoes for sweet potatoes and add half water, half apple juice… just be creative and adventuresome. it won’t always turn out, but I think what you learn from making a bad dish will always outweigh the frustration of having to chuck your dinner and have peanut butter sandwiches instead.