The Chowder Confessional

I have a humorous (at least to me) story to tell. Well, maybe not a story, maybe more like another stinkin' confessional. It involves this White-Cheddar Corn Chowder recipe that Raechel posted on her blog. She had posted a tweet about eating it the same night I had burnt our dinner--for the first time in our married life, I should add. Of course her elegant chowder sounded wonderful compared to Burnt Pork Nastiness (I don't even like pork, but a big frozen hunk of it was sitting in our freezer, screaming to be used up), so I asked for the recipe and she, as usual, delivered.

Have I ever mentioned Raechel is my hero? Not only has she sustained some pretty incredible blows to her and her little family's life (go here if you're curious about the beginning of the story), but she manages to keep her head above it all with an amazing faith in her Savior's grace and bounty. Plus she's cute, she's incredibly creative, her house is darling, and she likes to cook fun things like this chowder. When we were college roommates, she was the girl who introduced me to the very cheap, yet supremely satisfying, concept of egg sandwiches. She has come a long way from the eggs, as the two times we have visited her and her boys in Tennessee she has cooked up wonderfully exotic-sounding things for us, each and every meal. So naturally I want to emulate her mad cooking skills and try to be like her on occasion.

Thus I tried my hand at the chowder last night. Now you need to know that I am not above cutting corners, substituting, and just generally being a little half-you-know-what about cooking. Usually things turn out okay, because usually I have good enough sense about what will and what won't work out in a meal. I've been doing this often and long enough to get away with this, or at least that's what I tell myself. Plus I kind of have to accept the occasional half-way approach to cooking because usually I have three crying kids all vying for my attention... while the dutch oven is overflowing with boiling water.

Welcome to my world.

So here is a list of the things I cheated on when I prepared the lovely White-Cheddar Corn Chowder last night:

• First off, I didn't use white cheddar. I shop at Aldi and UltraFoods, folks. I don't think those particular stores even know what white cheddar is. We are just at that time in our lives where things are lean and I have to be as strict and sensible as humanly possible when I shop for groceries. I'm not trying to garner sympathy, I'm just telling the truth. And I didn't see the sense in buying either a nice block or bag of white cheddar so I could use 2 oz. of it to sprinkle on our chowder. I wish I could have; I'm sure it would have added a very nice, sharp element to the soup. Instead, I just used what sharp regular cheddar we already had in the fridge.

• Also, I cheated on the corn. The recipe calls for fresh corn from 6 ears of corn. If you had been in our home yesterday, you would have heard me shout out, "Six ears of corn? What do you expect of me?! I already cut up an onion and peeled and cut three potatoes!!" I'm just that way. I absolutely hate peeling and cutting up potatoes, and I felt I had done a Great Thing by following the recipe and purchasing some Yukon Golds instead of substituting some plain old baking potatoes. Plus corn isn't in season, which is something we've recently become concerned with. So, since we aren't starting a garden until the spring and I don't have anything canned myself, I just used a couple of cans of sweet corn I had from the store.

• 2 cups homemade or store-bought low-sodium chicken stock... this didn't happen. I boiled up two bouillon cubes and called it good.

• Also, the only milk we have in the house is either whole or vanilla-flavored soy, so the nonfat milk thing didn't happen either. (For the record, I used the whole. Call it my cooking intuition, but I just didn't think vanilla soy milk would work well with this. When you have cooked as much as I have, you'll have this very same intuition.)

• For whatever reason, I didn't have cayenne pepper. I searched my spice collection high and low and finally gave up in despair, instead using Tabasco sauce. Also, believe it or not, I didn't have coriander. I am a little ashamed about this. I have been cooking several nights a week for the last almost-four years, and I have never needed coriander. I don't even know what it is, and I'm too lazy to google it at the moment. When I was at UltraFoods on Wednesday I noted that it was on my shopping list (I am that organized), so I sauntered over to the spice aisle, all ready to possess yet another jazzy spice. Imagine my absolutely shock when one container of it was priced at over five dollars. Now maybe you're shocked that five dollars seemed like a lot to me, but really, we're in that lean time of our lives, remember? Five dollars is a lot for a container of a spice that I have never used and don't know if I will ever use again. Perhaps you are a spice junkie (I have a suspicion Rae is) and will vehemently argue against my reasoning. Be that as it may, I weighed the need for coriander against the money left in my grocery envelope, and I ended up leaving it out of my grocery cart, as well as this recipe.

• Ah, the white wine. It hadn't occurred to me to have cooking wine on hand (thanks, Rae, for that suggestion), but I, as usual, have a massive container of apple juice haunting our fridge, so I just used that instead.

• I just used pepper out of the shaker instead of freshly grinding it because our pepper mill (which we do possess, thank you!) has been acting up lately. Plus the natives were getting really, really restless at this point in the recipe, so me taking the time to grind the pepper would have sent them over the edge.

• Those are all the corners I cut, but I would like to mention that I almost completely forgot about the bacon, dear heavens we cannot forget bacon in a recipe that actually calls for it, that would be blasphemy, and then when I did finally remember it, I nearly burnt it. Geez.

So that's how I made this chowder. Like a crazy person. And you know what? It turned out tasting really good, and I plan on adding it to our meal rotation. Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to diss on Raechel's original recipe and the fact that she probably lovingly did everything it said and had everything it called for--I respect her immensely for this. I wish I had been able to follow it to the letter. It probably would have turned out even better had I been a more responsible cook, and someday I will possess such exotic spices as coriander and cayenne pepper. But I just wanted to share how a few (okay, several) substitutions don't have to necessarily ruin a meal.

And for the record, my husband just wandered into the room and said, and I quote, "I love it when you make a meal like last night, because then I have leftovers for lunch for a long time."

If that doesn't warm the cockles of my heart, then I don't know what does.