Happiness is...

Fri., Oct. 9, 2009

...a favorite movie on a rainy day...  

...a new pair of classy boots...

...and a hot bowl of home-made soup :).

Sweet salmon chowder, to be exact! I missed Wheaton's Fish Friday tradition-- their fish was never very good, but they usually had surprisingly tasty chowder. I didn't have any clams, but I got some salmon on sale last time I went grocery shopping. I was going to just broil it with some breadcrumbs or something, but I have so much work to do right now that I really just wanted something I could eat easily and lazily. Here's the recipe, for my own future reference if nothing else:




Ingredients
1 large carrot
1/2 medium yellow onion
2 redskin potatoes
6 oz. salmon fillet
4 cups? milk (I used 2% because that's what I had)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon EVOO
1/3 cup? flour
3 cloves garlic
about 1 inch of ginger
pinch or rosemary
pinch of parsley
salt to taste

• Melt butter and EVOO at medium heat in a large saucepan. 
• Dice onion and carrot and toss into hot butter with the rosemary, parsley, and smashed ginger and garlic.
• Cover the pot at let everything sweat out until the carrots are fork tender, probably 10 minutes or so. Stir whenever you get fidgety :).
• When the aromatics are soft, cut up the potatoes into small cubes (skin on!) and add to the pot. Cover again and let sweat again once the potatoes look a little less opaque on the outside and are soggy in with the butter and spices. 
• Add the flour. There should be enough that there should be a very thick (but not dry) paste of flour and butter clinging to the vegetables. Let this toast until it is slightly browned.
• Pour in milk enough to cover all the vegetables plus about an inch or two over. Gradually bring the soup to a boil, making sure to stir often so the milk doesn't burn and the flour doesn't clump.It should be pretty thick.
  
• Meanwhile, poach the salmon in a small pan with as little water as possible. Depending on how thick your fillet is, it'll probably take 5 or 6 minutes to cook through. When it is cooked, remove it from the pot but RESERVE THE WATER! Cut/flake the salmon into bitesize pieces and remove the skin pull out any bones that you find.
• Add the salmon water to the soup until it is whatever thickness you like. Check on the potatoes for doneness; they should be forktender but not to soft or they'll fall apart in the soup. As soon as they seem just about done, add the salmon into the soup and stir gently. Salmon is a pretty firm fish, but even so you don't want to break it all. 
• Salt to taste and pull out the big bits of ginger and garlic if you want to or can even find them; you don't really need to.

And that's it! Serve with nice crunchy toast and (in my case) apple juice. Because of the carrots and ginger, it has a slightly sweet note running through it, kind of the same way corn chowder does. It's a very different flavor than a traditional celery-based chowder, but it's not distracting. The above recipe makes about one regular large saucepan full of soup; guess what I'm going to be eating a lot of this weekend as I slave away : ).