It doesn't happen often, but occasionally an urge strikes to make something new and miraculously you have everything you need without having to make a special trip to three markets to gather rare and/or random ingredients.
Recently that happened to me as I was reading
my favorite food magazine. First I came across a really easy recipe for
corn chowder, and I thought to myself: "I have fresh corn that I stripped from the cob at the end of the summer and stored in quart size ziplocs in my freezer just awaiting the perfect recipe" (one of the rewards of shopping at Berkeley Bowl and finding huge bags of produce at reduced prices because they aren't quite display-perfect specimens). Granted, I did not have a loaf of pumpernickel bread laying around with which to make the recommended croutons, but I deemed those unnecessary as I turned the page and...
...came across a really easy recipe for
cheese straws. Who doesn't like cheese straws?!
It was one of those lazy, rainy Sundays; in other words, the perfect day to spend puttering about the kitchen. So I did. I ran into a couple of hitches: the chowder is over-abundant with corn (something I didn't previously think possible), and the instructions for the straws left me bewildered as to how I could "roll" a 1/4 inch wide strip of chilled dough into a straw, but I made it work.
Of course the final touch: adding bacon to the chowder. Because really, what isn't made better by the addition of bacon?
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