After a brief hiatus, I am once again joining Cook the Book Fridays group through cooking through Dorie Greenspan’s Every Day Dorie. This time it is a fresh corn off the cob chowder. Over the past few months I have increasingly loved going to Farm Boy for all of our groceries; especially fresh vegetables!
Dan and I prepped the recipe this morning and by noon we were able to have it for lunch (taking us roughly one hour to prep and cook). Dorie’s recipe involves splitting the corn kernels, garlic and onions into two separate bowls to start. One bowl will eventually be the start of the corn chowder, while the other bowl is for the toppings (corn, onion, garlic along with the bacon).
To maximize time, while the soup was cooking on the stove (potatoes, corn, chicken stock and some sprigs of thyme), we also cooked the bacon in the cast iron. In Dorie’s recipe she describes cooking the soup first, and then after blending up the soup (with cobs & stringy herbs discarded) to start on the toppings.
While the rest of the soup simmered away, we multi-tasked! Cooked the bacon, and then the remaining garlic, onion and corn on the cast iron in the remaining bacon fat.
For serving, I scooped the blended soup into bowls then added in some cubed cooked potatoes, the corn topping followed by the bacon. For this bowl, I added in some kale for extra colour and flavour as we had a kale caesar salad to accompany the soup. 
I would definitely make this recipe again. Though, I am sure that only fresh corn cobs will do. However, I am sure that in a pinch canned corn kernels will work too. I do love cooking the cobs in the soup to add further flavour. The corn also stayed nicely crisp and sweet. I should also note that I ended up using mostly chicken stock with 1 cup of water mixed in for my soup as I didn’t have any chicken cubes. As for the bacon (though not always necessary for soups), it gave this corn chowder soup the additional salt flavour it needed. Also, how could we say no to bacon?
Plus, it is a real treat to be able to cook this recipe with fresh corn from Ontario. I’ll have to try again when we are back in Alberta to compare.
Hope you enjoyed this recipe and will make it yourself. It’s found in page 72 of Dorie Greenspan’s Everday Dorie! Even better, I found the recipe on Dorie Greenspan’s site.
Also do check out how everyone else from Cook the Book Fridays did on this recipe!