Dinner Diaries

In my futile attempt to become a domestic superwoman and whip up meals just like Rachel Ray, I am going to start my own section called the Dinner Diaries. Until recently, I was not a meal planner. When going to the grocery store I bought the same items every time. About 4:30 each afternoon I would stand looking at my refigerator wondering......What will I make tonight? Surprisingly, I was able to come up with some pretty interesting meals. I can make a casserole out of anything. Anything. But lately, I've been trying the whole "meal planning" approach. I sit down and pick eight meals that will last us two weeks. (I've found that one or two nights we'll eat leftovers or sandwiches and one night we'll be out and about for dinner. On average 4, seems to be the magic number of meals cooked). I make an ingredient list and head to the grocery. Of those eight meals, five or six of them will be things that I've never made before. They are mostly things I've seen on cooking shows and want to try. Some of them turn out well, and some....well....won't get made a second time. So the Dinner Diaries will be a place for me to store the meals that turned out well (didn't people used to use recipe boxes for this purpose?) and hopefully I can try them again. Eventually I will be able to switch to the beta version of blogger and then I can add labels to my posts and all of the dinner diaires can be displayed together for easier viewing.

Last night we had friends over for dinner. For those living in Nashville, I LOVE the corn chowder served at Blackstone downtown. Inspired by Blackstone, my new Taste of Home Magazine, and the yucky, rainy weather, I tried to make my own Corn Chowder. I went online and pieced together a variety of recipies and this is what I came up with.

1/2 package bacon
2 medium onions
1 large bell pepper
2 cups diced potato (I used frozen hashbrowns)
1 can cream corn
1 small package frozen corn
1 can chicken broth
1 pint heavy cream
Milk

First, I cut and fried the bacon and then set aside. I sauted diced onions and bell peppers in the bacon fat until soft. I added bacon, onions, peppers, potatoes and corn to a crock pot. I added the broth, cream and milk until everything was covered. Later, I had to thicken the soup twice (making a roux with butter, flour and soup liquid on stove and then adding back to crock pot) as it was not as creamy as a chowder should be. In the future I would add the thickeners to the onions and peppers and go from there.

This made a full crock pot and served six adults, four children (okay four small bowls because none of them actually ate the soup even though we called in Dinosaur soup and said the pieces of corn were dinosaur teeth) and had two full bowls left over.