The Andrew Extravaganza

Last night I took my first crack at making chowder. Taken from the January 2004 Southern Living, this recipe was very easy to make and surprisingly delicious. I used crawfish instead of shrimp because I didn't feel like peeling and deveining the little buggers all afternoon. If you're not a vegetarian and you want a quick, cheap meal, do yourself a favor and make this chowder. It makes a bunch so you will have several meals worth of leftovers. Or I suppose you could just halve the recipe.

To save a little money you can get away with only 1 lb of your chosen seafood, but if you decide to go with the full 2 lbs I think you'll find the higher density of crustaceans well worth the additional cash. You could also substitute for the seafood with cooked chicken.

Quick Seafood Chowder
Southern Living, January 2004 ed.

Makes: 12 cups

2 T butter or margarine
2 (10.75 oz.) cans cream of potato soup
1 medium onion, finely diced
3 1/2 c milk
1/4 t ground red pepper

1 to 2 lbs. medium fresh shrimp, peeled
OR
1 to 2 lbs. frozen crawfish tails, thawed just before use

1 c (4 oz.) shredded Monterey Jack cheese
Fresh chopped parsley (optional garnish)

Directions:
Melt butter in a Dutch oven (or large pot) over medium heat. Add onion and sprinkle lightly with salt. Sauté 8 minutes or until tender. Stir in cream of potato soup, milk and pepper; bring to a boil. Add seafood. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring often. Stir in cheese until melted. Garnish with parsley and serve with crackers if desired. Serve immediately.

So how long do you actually end up cooking the seafood? It doesn't sound like very long, like maybe 5-10 minutes. I guess that's enough? I imagined that you'd stew chowder for a long time to bring out the flavor. Is that why you have to cook the chicken if you are going to substitute it?

It sounds tasty minus the seafood or chicken.

Andrew, I'm officially begging you: become a chef. Follow this link to a list of schools that offer some form of culinary arts education:
http://www.allculinaryschools.com/find/results.php?st=TX&prog=culinary-arts-degree-programs&submit=Find+a+School

Shrimp don't take very long to cook, with the liquids just finished boiling, 5 minutes should suffice. In fact you have to be careful not to cook them too long, once they have a nice pink color they are finished. The crawfish come pre-cooked in the frozen packages. As far as the flavors coming out with longer cooking, it isn't necessary here and with a cream based dish it could be detrimental to the quality (not sure because I don't have a lot of chowder experience). As with the gumbo, the flavor of the leftovers is slightly intensified.

I would love to have the chance to go to a culinary school, but being a chef would involve too much time and hard work. I'm a lazy gold-bricker by nature.

Hard work jokes aside, do you think you could enjoy cooking as a profession? It's just that you seem passionate about cooking. Notice that you haven't made any blog posts about heat transfer or process quality control.

Good point. At this point, heat transfer makes me want to puke. But I have always enjoyed classes on quality control and the practical aspects of it while at Rhodia. I don't know, I guess it (cooking as profession) is something to think about.