A Cooking Update

I have had a tremendously lazy blogging week, probably because I’ve had a very feisty cooking one. I made a few new recipes this week, shook up our “in a rut” eating patterns, and then sat down with my laptop and thought, “I don’t have the energy at all to write about this”. But for posterity’s sake, I need to put to pen to paper (blog-style) about the corn recipes I made this week, so next September I’m not sitting around thinking, “Wait, weren’t there some corn things I used to make that were totally awesome? What were those, again?”

Anyway, the first notable thing I made this week was a tasty treat for Boomer, who got back on Sunday afternoon from visiting KtG in The Hague. I had a flashback before she left to a dessert we used to love when we were living in AZ while Pookie was still at NYU. It’s a bread-and-butter pudding that Pookie hated, and it’s a billion times more delicious than the effort you have to put into making it would suggest.

I remembered the recipe was from Gourmet, and I knew it was in my little binder of clipped-out recipes (which I update oh… every five years or so, so it’s hardly a reliable source), but I was being lazy and figured I’d find it on Epicurious. When I searched “bread and butter pudding”, I found a whole bunch of things with reviews that said stuff like, “This is heinous!” and “I would rather STARVE than eat that again” (I might be exaggerating), and I was getting depressed that I was making it up that the recipe I remembered was tasty, but then, at the end of the search, there it was. With reader reviews raving about its awesomeness. Woo hoo! All I can say about this recipe is that I don’t really love bread pudding, but I adore this. It’s every bit as good as I remembered, and even simpler to make. And it was a great “Welcome Home!” treat for Boomer.

The theme of the rest of the week, then, was corn. Pookie emailed me the link to this post on Kitchen Confit with a corn chowder recipe, and insisted that I make it, even though she doesn’t like corn chowder. Well, I happen to enjoy corn chowder quite a bit, so who was I to say no? I picked up a half dozen ears of the end-of-summer corn at the farm stand (normally I’m done buying it by now, because it’s nowhere near as sweet as it was at this time last month), parceled out a couple pounds of potatoes from my farm share, and whipped up a huge-assed pot of this soup.

I cannot stress enough how delicious this recipe is. And on a chilly night in September, with Fall really and truly here, it was just perfect. What’s better than a cozy, creamy, lightly spiced bowl of soup on an autumn night? Nothing, that’s what! I checked at the farm stand, and they said they’d have corn for another couple of weeks. That means we’re eating this at least six more times before the fresh corn is gone for the winter. And then we’ll start eating this made with the corn I froze last month.

The chowder really energized me to enjoy the waning moments of corn availability, and prompted by an assignment from Pookie from her work, I started searching for more corn recipes. What I found amazed me: How have I never made corn and potato cakes before? I love corn! I love potatoes! I love cake!

I used red pepper instead of green, and the end result was this insanely sweet, delicious, pan-fried heap of scrumptiousness. I’m sure if I was using actual starchy potatoes (like the recipe calls for) instead of the waxy ones from the farm, they would have held together better, but really, who cares? The really shocking thing about this meal, though, was that I made it on a Friday. Yeah, you heard me — on a Friday. It’s probably been ten years since I’ve cooked anything on a Friday, our traditional DiGiorno night. But this week I turned things on their ear, and we had the DiGiorno on Wednesday, to go with ANTM and Project Runway, and I made a full, wonderful meal on Friday instead. A meal of drunken beans made with Rancho Gordo marrow beans, and these corn cakes, and some Oktoberfest beer from Triumph. It’s safe to say this was the best dinner I’ve had on a Friday night in probably a decade.

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