Creamed Corn Soup with Crab and Avocado

JT enjoyed a soup similar to this at the Ritz Carlton Toca in Toronto on his birthday and I told him I would replicate it as soon as the Ontario corn was available.
To be truthful, I made this very soup when our dear friends Barb and Kevin (Profiteroles and Ponytails) spent a weekend at the cottage, but I forgot to take photos and I know better than to post a recipe sans photos so I had to make it again, this time with notes and photos! The soup I made for Barb and Kevin used a combination of white corn and fresh Peaches and Cream Corn. The white corn was part of my shopping spree with Chgo John From the Bartolini Kitchens. I didn’t include the white corn in this recipe because I found it too starchy tasting and decided it didn’t enhance the soup at all, so my second attempt used only fresh Peaches and Cream Ontario Corn.
It’s creamed but there is not a spot of cream in it; the inherent texture of the corn makes it velvety smooth and you really don’t need cream at all.
Crab and corn are a match made in heaven and turns this simple soup into a meal, avocado added to anything really ups the ante! We grilled the corn on a charcoal grill to enhance the smoky flavour, but if you can’t grill it, just add it to the pot and cook the kernels a bit longer. Frozen corn also works well in a pinch, but shhhhhh — that’s our little secret!

Creamed corn, avocado, crab and more corn. YUM!

Creamed Corn Chowder with Avocado and Crab

(makes about 3 to 4 cups depending on how thick you wish the soup to be)

Ingredients:

• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 cup Vidalia onion finely chopped
• 2 1/2 cups charcoal grilled corn
• 1 bacon rasher
• 1 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika (optional if you can’t grill the corn)
• 1 tin crab meat with whole legs
• 1/2 small avocado, in cubes and sprinkled with lime juice
• juice of one lime
• 2-3 tbsp chopped cilantro
• 500-1,000 mL vegetable or chicken stock
• 1-2 tbsp olive oil
• Sea salt to taste

Directions:

1. Grill fresh corn on a charcoal grill. Slice off kernels and reserve.
2. Heat a pan with olive oil and sauté the bacon adding the onions and cooking until translucent, add the garlic, cumin and smoked paprika (if using).
3. Add all the corn kernels but 1/2 cup (set aside for the garnish)
4. Add stock and purée until smooth with an immersion blender, adding stock until desired thickness is achieved. Season with sea salt to taste.
5. Press through a fine sieve.
6. In a small bowl, combine drained crab, corn, cubed avocado, chopped cilantro and freshly squeezed lime juice. Season with sea salt to taste. Stir well.
7. Ladle hot soup into bowls and garnish with a generous spoonful of the crab mixture in the centre. Serve with a grilled crostini on a deck over looking the lake. That last bit is optional, but it does enhance the experience.

We eat out on the deck as much as possible.

May I offer you a bowl?

We’ve been spending a lot of time at the cottage this August and I thought I’d share a few of the meals we’ve been enjoying. Cottage is for laid back times, but that doesn’t mean soup out of a can or even ready made products, for me it’s time to really enjoy having time to do things right.

I made a pulled pork Tenderloin in the slow cooker and it provided a variety of meals such as pulled pork flatbread.

The pulled pork recipe can be found here.

A wonderful hors d’œuvres of seared scallop wrapped in Prosciutto on Avocado paste smeared crostini.

Click here. for this tasty recipe.

A nice lunch of deconstructed Caesar Salad, with avocado and Canadian Bacon

Links can be found here and here.

Mulligatawny Soup with Shrimps. This soup transformed itself into BBQ sauce (add vinegar and brown sugar and a dash of soy sauce), and to Shakshuka (a middle eastern tomato based egg dish).

Muligatawny recipe can be found here.
Shakshuka recipe can be found here.
I made the BBQ sauce on the fly, so there is no recipe!

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“Irish” Fish Chowder with Oat Scones a St. Patrick’s Day Celebration

Did I mention that I prepare my posts well in advance? Here’s proof!

I know I’m a (lot) late for St. Patrick’s Day, but perhaps you will bookmark it for next year or any time. The Friday before St. Patrick’s Day I saw a lovely post for Beef and Guinness Pie at my friend Karen’s Back Road Journal and even though I can’t tell you how tempting it was, I had to resist making it as we’d already had beef a few times that week and I usually like to keep it to once per week, maximum three times per month. So when she suggested we pop over to Colin Bofin’s blog, an actual Irish dude in Ireland, I was all over it! Colin prepares a Guinness Stew that has the most irresistible dumplings and I’m certain that his home has incredible aromas when he prepares this dish. Still having had too much beef that week, I started to wonder through Conor’s blog and I came across a lovely Irish Seafood Chowder and Scones. I couldn’t help but think that I had found my St. Patrick’s Day recipe. Thanks Conor, I’ll be stopping by your blog for inspiration again.

Colin made his own prawn stock from scratch (actually, they look more like our langoustines) but I remembered I had a bag of lobster carcass in my freezer and I knew I had the ingredients for my stock. At the time, we were still off eating fresh salmon because I wasn’t sure what the influenza implications were, so I used a tin of salmon instead. I also omitted the potato and cut down the carrot just because I’m still trying to reduce my carbs. The broth is a luxurious, creamy, velvety broth with much resemblance to the Provençal Fish Soup I made in October 2011; I cannot resist adding tomatoes and saffron to fish soup, it’s such a compelling flavour combination for my taste.

Don’t be fooled, there is an incredible amount of flavour in the carcass of a lobster, even if someone already ate all the good bits!

An incredible smooth, creamy fish velouté

A few chunks of seafood added to the centre spices up the soup and adds an incredible texture and flavour; the Shrimp was so sweet.

“Irish” Fish Chowder

Makes ~1.5 litres of stock

Ingredients:

• ~542 g lobster carcass (or you can use the actual beast with the meat). Use only larger bits of shell (the smaller one’s may jam up your blender) or wrap the entire carcass in cheese cloth to contain
• 260 g celeriac, chopped finely
• 250 g onion, chopped finely
• 160 g carrot, grated
• 2 bay leaves
• 4 cloves of garlic, smashed
• 1 tomato
• 200 g skinless, boneless canned salmon (or use fresh)
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 tsp saffron
• 2 L water
• sea salt to taste
• 1-2 tbsp canola oil
• 50 g per serving mixed seafood, such as shrimp, calamari, crab, whitefish, mussels and such

Directions:

1. Soak the saffron in 1/2 cup of white wine. Set aside.
2. Heat the canola oil in a large stock pot. Sauté the onions, garlic, carrot and celery root. Turn the heat down.
3. Add the lobster carcass, bay leaves, salmon and saffron wine and stir well.
4. Drain the oil or water off the salmon and add it to the pot.
5. Cover with 2 L of fresh cold water and turn the heat up.
6. Gently simmer for about 1 hour or until vegetables are soft and the broth is fragrant with the ingredients.
7. Strain the liquid into a large bowl with high sides.
8. Remove all the bits of shell from the strained vegetables. Return the vegetables to the broth and blend until smooth and creamy with a good heavy duty immersion blender. Strain through a fine sieve, reserving the pulp. Add cup of the strained soup to the pulp and blend again with the immersion blender, you will be surprised how much more of this pulp can be blended down fine enough to be pushed through the sieve. Press through the fine sieve again into the reserved strained soup. Return this liquid to the soup pot and begin to boil it down to reduce to about 1.5 L. What you want to end up with is a thick, flavourful chowder.
9. When you have the consistency you want, add the mixed seafood (about 50 g per person) and cook through. Ladle the hot chowder into lovely rimmed bowls and pile 50 g of mixed seafood into the centre of each bowl, serve with warm oat scones and butter (pop over to Colin’s blog for the scone recipe).

The oat scones were wonderful with a small pat of butter oozily melting into them.

The oat scones had more texture than a regular scone and was perfect for dipping into the soup.

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Crab and Avocado Salad and a little technical info

Hi everyone, hope you all had a great weekend. I thought I would post a public service message in this post. As most of you know by now, I do most of my commenting using my iPhone 4s just because it’s more convenient and I am able to read and comment on the go! What some of you don’t know is that WordPress so generously provides Mobile Device optimization (I’m sure the other webwares do as well, I just don’t know how to set it up) which means that when I go to your WordPress blog on my phone, WordPress recognizes that I’m checking it out on my mobile device and reformats it to the best viewing configuration. Cool huh?

This is the example that is Not Optimized for Mobile.
I have to zoom in so I could read it.

This is optimized for my mobile device.
See how WordPress compacts everything so it’s easy to navigate and read?

But some of you don’t have this turned on, so this is the public service bit. On your computer, go to your Dashboard and click “Appearance”, then “Mobile” in the menu across the far left. Click “yes” to enable mobile theme and that way your images and text will be formatted to look the best on the mobile device. By clicking yes to “show excerpts on front pages instead of full posts” gives you a reader digest version of the post, which makes it much easier if you are looking for something specific.

See Mobile at the bottom? Highlight it.

I’ve set my options they way I want my blog to look on your mobile device.

And while I’m at it, I also noticed that some of you don’t have a “search” button on your site (mobile or not), which I personally find frustrating when I’m trying to source a recipe I remember reading about on your blog. In WordPress, it is in “Appearance” under “Widgets”; you will need to add the search widget so it’s on your blog.

And not that I am any expert in blogging or Google, I recently found out that Google reads content and the more robust your content is the more likely it will come up on the first page when someone Google’s something you’ve blogged about (ever wonder why Wiki is usually first on a search? It’s subject specific content!). Why did I bring this up? Well, it’s because I used name my photos IMG 12345_BLOG.jpg, which to Google means absolutely nothing. So to increase the ‘value’ of content on your blog, name your photos what it is so that Google can read it, for example Pesto.jpg. You can also add alternative text which also increases its search capability, for example, for my pesto photo, I might add basil pesto as the alternative text.  Now if you will excuse me, I have a lot of work to rename my 1,712 images! Back to regular programming.

Remember the crab legs we bought for Christmas Eve when my brother cancelled Christmas because the kids were sick? We froze them in good thick plastic bags for another time and I’m so glad I did. Two of the four legs made this salad and it was absolutely delightful. I used Thai flavours to bring out the fresh, sweet flavour of the crab. I will make it again it’s a very tasty salad.

Crab and Avocado Salad

The King Crab is very flavourful, so you really don’t need much.

Serves 4 as an appetizer portion

Ingredients:

• 2 large King crab legs, cooked, shelled and cut into bite sized pieces.
• 1/4 cup sweet yellow corn
• 1/2 an avocado, cut into small cubes
• 1 tbsp cilantro, chopped and a few sprigs for garnish
• 1 green onion, chopped finely.
• 1/4 cup lime juice
• 2 tsp sugar
• 4 handfuls of baby arugula
• 2 tbsp of the 19-ingredient slaw apricot dressing

Directions:

1. Combine the king grab legs, sweet yellow corn, avocado, cilantro and green onion. Set aside.
2. Combine the lime juice and sugar so that the sugar melts.
3. Toss the crab salad with the lime dressing to coat well.
4. Toss the arugula with the 19-ingredient slaw dressing to coat well.
5. Plate a handful of the arugula on each plate and top with the crab salad. Garnish with a sprig of cilantro.
6. Serve cold.

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Surimi ‘Crab’ Salad, a nice light summer dinner

The weather in Toronto is warm and crisp this week, the humidity is all but gone, which is a lovely change to the close weather we were having over the last couple of weeks (sadly, it will turn ‘oven-hot’ again tonight). We turned the A/C off and opened windows, taking full advantage of all the fresh air, but someone forgot to tell the birds that 3:30am is far too early to get up and start chirping. Did they not get them memo?

Here is one of the culprits, I’m sure (I didn’t want to scare him so I took the photo through the screened window). This Blue Jay (not to be confused with our team*)  and his partner were at the feeder by the kitchen window the other day — the small bird feeder. The partner was smart and was picking up the seeds from the ground. Can you see how ridiculously he is balancing to get to the seeds (his feet are hanging onto the feeder just below his neck and he is balancing with his tail); clearly this feeder is not his size!

It’s like he sitting at the ‘kids table’

This incredible weather also means that we can enjoy our meals al fresco under the canopy of the arbor in our garden. Our lives are a little topsy turvy as JT recently started a new job that has him working some nights until 8:30 which leaves me to prepare ‘dinners’ that will mainly be used as lunches for us both the following day. I guess this forces me to eat, because I can get caught up in various chores around the house or blogging and simply forget to eat (I can be pretty focused). In general, I come home, cook ‘dinner’ eat it and prepare our lunches for the following day. Then I sit and blog. Sometimes I cook something I can blog about, this is one of those times.

Would you say this is a 3 dressed up as a 9?

Sissi at With a Glass reminded me of Surimi Crab (yes, fake crab) and that it does have a place on the luncheon menu, as long as you buy good quality brand and pair it with a tasty side or salad (Sissi and Maria at A-Boleyn made fresh rolls out of them which for me ended up to be rather unattractive when I tried to make them, practice makes perfect!) So an Asian inspired Surimi ‘crab’ salad was to be on the menu on this day. Surimi ‘crab’ is low in fat, contains some omega-3 so it is a good low fat dinner/lunch option.

Incidentally, we are presently redesigning the packaging for Clover Leaf Surimi (we do all of their packaging, the photos in the link are NOT our’s, they were provided) so it’s apt that I post a recipe for it. Sadly, my photography skills do not compare to the skills at our studio, but then again, nor does my camera! The plate, however, is a hand-me-down from the studio!

We are heading out to Illinois and Wisconsin this weekend (it’s a long weekend for us too, in Canada we celebrate Canada Day on July 1) to visit our friends Paul and T, so I want to use up the fresh goods in the fridge so I don’t have to toss them (or worse yet, so they don’t walk out on their own!). Much of this recipe is what’s in my fridge right now, I was trying to go without purchasing new produce. The measures are eyeballed, go with your tastebuds. The trick to this salad (or slaw) is to cut all of the vegetables uniformly so you can get a little bite of everything. To keep this salad over a few days, separate the wet (cucumber and mango) from the rest and mix as required. The ratio should be about 1/3 wet to 2/3 dry.

Surimi “Crab” Salad

Serves 4 (2 for lunch and 2 for dinner, 100 g protein portions each)

Ingredients:

• 4oo g Surimi Crab, flake style
• 1./2 Jicama or Yambean, finely grated on  a mandolin
• 1/2 celeriac or celery root, finely grated on  a mandolin
• 6 radishes, finely grated on  a mandolin
• 3 green onions, finely chopped
• 5 mint leaves, finely chopped
• 10-20 Thai basil leaves, finely chopped
• 2 regular basil leaves, finely chopped
• 1/2 English cucumber, finely grated on  a mandolin
• 1 slightly unripened mango, finely grated on  a mandolin

Directions:

1. Combine the Jicama to the basil leaves and mix well. I use my hands so all the ingredients are evenly distributed in the salad.
2. Combine the cucumber and mango. Keep the wet from the rest so that the salad doesn’t wilt in the fridge. Mix only as required.

Dressing Ingredients:

This is just eyeballing, make the dressing to your own taste.

• Trim off bits of mango from the stone (keeping away from the stone) that you weren’t able to grate with the mandolin (you’ll be surprised how much fruit is left over).
• 1/4 cup rice vinegar
• 1/4 lime cordial
• 1-2 tsp fish sauce
• 1-2 tsp sesame oil
• 1/2 tsp hot pepper flakes (or to taste)

Dressing Instructions:

1. Add all the ingredients to your immersion blender container and blend until smooth. Taste and adjust as required.

Assemble Instructions:

1. Combine 1/3 wet ingredients with 2/3 dry and mix well. Add a few tablespoons of the dressing and mix again.
2. Plate, adding about 100 g surimi crab.
3. Garish with sesame seeds, if desired, I forgot.

What ever it is, it sure is tasty

Notes:

• I use Rose’s Lime Cordial as a short cut for lime juice and honey. I find it has the right balance for sweet and sour for my taste buds.
• About a 1/2 cup of chopped cilantro is a wonderful addition. I didn’t have cilantro at home (my plant died) and in order not to buy anything new to make this meal, I omitted it.
• Red cabbage also makes a great addition to this salad (see above for why it’s not in the recipe)
• Mango has the same toxic ingredient as does poison ivy, therefore you want to ensure you remove ALL of the skin and stay about 0.5 cm from the stone. This ingredient causes stomach upset.
• If you run out of mango, I have successfully substituted dried apricot (reconstituted with a little water) or even tamarind paste, both make exceptional dressings but you will need to adjust the salty and sour bits to taste.

*Sports reference provided for my friend Jed, the Sportsglutton

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