Corn chowder

When I worked at Mike's Bistro, they made this awesome corn chowder. It used sweet summer corn, and became super rich and creamy purely by solubilizing the sugars and starches in the corn itself. We tried to recreate this.

It didn't quite work. First of all, maybe we were supposed to use that white sweet corn and instead we used the yellow corn from Shoprite (17 cents each!). It tasted sweet to me, but maybe it wasn't sweet enough.

Also, I didn't follow a recipe. I shaved the kernels off the corn and then put them, along with sauteed onions and some spices, into a crock pot. Then I threw in the corn cobs and set it on low. The plan was for the water to slowly extract a succulent corn stock from the cobs and make the soup thick and rich. That didn't happen.

Again, might have been the corn, but I also blame the crock pot. Its low setting is pretty weak. For example, one time I put dried beans in there and set them at low for, like, 12 hours and the beans were still hard afterwards. Seriously? So maybe that's why we got no stock.

We ultimately saved the soup by dumping in some cream (when in doubt, add salt, sugar or fat) and zhuzhing it (uh, I mean pureeing it with our hand blender).

It was ok.