Spicy Corn and Potato Chowder {Recipe}

This weekend I was looking for a recipe for a soup to make while the boys were at Cub Scouts Polar Camp (freezing outside all day in Minnesota!).  I found a recipe for Corn and Potato Chowder here and decided to give it a try.  I had some of the ingredients on hand, but also knew that I was not going to make a trip to the store, so I needed to improvise.



Here’s what I put in the crock pot:

• 3/4 bag of frozen hash browns (I prefer the little diced potatoes, but didn’t have any)
• 3 frozen chicken breasts
• 3 cups frozen sweet corn
• 4 cups homemade chicken broth
• 1 small onion, chopped
• salt and pepper

I let it cook for a few hours and then added:

• diced andouille sausage - It's fully cooked, but wanted the flavors to blend. I also peeled the "skin" off before chopping it up.

About 1 hour before serving, I pulled out the chicken breasts, shredded them, and tossed all the chicken back in. 

About 45 minutes before serving I scooped out about 3 cups of the soup to blend and add back in. An immersion blender would have worked great, but since I don’t have one I used my Magic Bullet to blend it up. This really helped to thicken the soup (just like hubby prefers).  The last thing I added was:

• 8 oz of light cream cheese

When it was time to serve, we added a little sharp cheddar and sprinkled a few bacon bits on top.  This soup was DELICIOUS!  It had just the right amount of spice from the sausage.  This will definitely be a regular recipe at our house!

Let me know what you think if you try it!

Mmmmm Morels!!!

Yesterday we visited my parents in Wisconsin and we were treated to some delicious morel mushrooms!

My Mom LOVES morels and goes out hunting for them every single year during “mushroom season”. As a kid, she always took me with. I know there was a time that I thought it was really fun and exciting to go looking for mushrooms, but then I think we had a few years where we didn’t find very many and I completely lost interest in the “hunt”. Maybe it was the years of “road hunting” for mushrooms with my Mom and her best friend?!? Road hunting basically meant that they would drive around looking for dead elm trees, and then have me (and sometimes her friend’s son) jump out of the car and check out the tree. This often meant climbing over/under a barbed wire fence onto someone’s farm land, dodging piles of cow poop, possibly jumping a little creek, and climbing up a hillside in hopes of MAYBE finding a few of these delicious morels. Did I mention it was often cold and raining? Oh, and then you need to check yourself over for wood ticks after you get home. Does this sound like fun to you???
We lucked out yesterday, since my Mom and her best friend (yes, the same one all these years later!) had already done the dirty work. The mushrooms were found, and waiting in the refrigerator to be cooked. She offered to cook us up a pan of “Sonic Morels” for us to enjoy and we couldn’t turn them down! Anthony does not like mushrooms (or at least the idea of mushrooms), so we tried to make them more interesting by calling them “Sonic Morels”. He did eat a few before declaring they were gross!
Before cooking:

Cooking:

Yes, that’s butter bubbling in the pan…

On my plate waiting for me to eat them:

It’s been years since I have eaten any morels and these tasted AMAZING!
How are they cooked? After you pick them, you wash them off, cut them in half down the middle, and soak in some salt water for awhile. Then you just coat them with flour, and fry them in a pan with a TON of butter. Like a LOT of butter. The REAL stuff. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper while they are cooking, and cook to your desired consistency. I like them a little crunchy, so I tend to cook them longer than most people do.
After eating up about half of my Mom’s stash of mushrooms, she wanted to take us up into the woods behind her house to look for a few more. My Mom walked up into the woods alone first, and came back down to the house to get my hubby and son so that they could go “find” their very first mushroom in the woods. By “find” I mean play a game of hot/cold with my Mom in an attempt to lead him to the mushroom she had already found and left waiting patiently in the woods.
So hubby, Anthony, my Mom and I headed up through the backyard to go mushroom hunting. Once we got into the woods, my Mom was calling out “getting warmer” to me, when I found one. I don’t think she really believed me at first (she had years of my trickery in the woods when I was a kid!) but when I turned and yelled that I had found a few more they all came over to check them out. Anthony and hubby got to pick their very first mushrooms! We did go over and pick the one she had originally found, as well as a few more. After about 20 minutes in the woods, we ended up with about 18 fresh mushrooms! Bless my Mom, she sent them all home with us!

Valentine Cookies

The other day I made a fruit pizza using some cookie dough. I didn’t need the entire batch of cookie dough for the pizza crust, so I rolled out a few cookies. I whipped up a quick batch of frosting (powdered sugar, butter, milk, vanilla and food coloring) and my little assistant took care of the sprinkles. So much fun and delicious too!!





I love how the center of each cookie is loaded with sprinkles!

Making Lefse!

Each December it is a family tradition at our house to make lefse. We both grew up making lefse with our grandmothers, and it’s a tradition we have continued. It’s a TON of work and makes the kitchen look like a flour bomb has exploded, but it is oh so good!

Transferring a piece to the lefse grill

While some people make super big pieces of lefse, we like to make them smaller. It makes them easier to work with when eating!

Our Assistant even stepped in to help a little bit!

The end result was 80+ pieces of lefse!

Doesn’t this look delicious?!?

We are lucky that our Grandma’s gave us everything we need to make lefse (grill, Bethany board, rollers, and sticks) as wedding gifts so that we can continue this tradition.

Our families will be happy to see that we have lefse to share at our family Christmas celebrations!

Sweet Corn!

In late summer we are lucky enough to enjoy delicious fresh sweet corn. Several times each week we stop at a local farmer's stand to pick up some sweet corn that was picked fresh that morning. We always buy a dozen ears (usually it's 14-15 ears) and we cook it all, knowing that we will only eat about 1/2 of it. The leftovers are always cut off the cob and frozen, to be saved for the perfect side dish later in the fall. When we are freezing corn, we usually put about 3-4 ears worth of corn per bag. Each bag is squeezed to eliminate air, dated, and then the bags are double-bagged into another freezer bag to help keep it fresh.

One evening we decided to buy 4 bags (approx 70 ears!!) to freeze, to ensure we would have LOTS of corn for later. Here is about 25% of the corn that we froze that evening:

After 2+ hours of work, we had 17 more bags of fresh corn to put in our deep freezer.

So delicious!!!