Corn and sweet potato chowder

Dinner tonight, cobbled together from various recipes found online:

4 cobs sweet corn

1 medium sweet potato

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

2 scallions

1 red pepper

1 jalapeno

1/4 c butter

1/4 c flour

4 c whole milk

salt, pepper, cumin

Recipe:  Preheat oven to 450.  Scrape corn kernels off the cobs.  Melt butter in pan, add flour, cook until it is roux.  Add a little more butter if needed and saute diced onion and garlic about 5 min until soft.  Add milk and kernel-less cobs.  Remove ribs and seeds from jalapeno and add it whole.  This is going to simmer about 30 mins. and meanwhile you are cutting up the sweet potato and red pepper and scallion and roasting them with the corn kernels until everything is slightly charred and smoky.  That being done, take some of the sweet potatoes and puree them with some soup to make a nice orange-brown paste.  Throw out the cobs and the jalapenos and put the sweet potato paste, red peppers, corn, and scallions in the soup.  Heat through, season with salt, pepper, cumin to taste.

Notes:  It’s not clear to me that the jalapeno added anything.  Also, it was too thick; next time I might skip the roux.

Update:  Skipped the roux, dropped the jalapeno, added a chopped/seeded Anaheim to the red pepper, even better.

Soup looked like this:

Improvised miso soup

I went out this afternoon during CJ’s nap to do a little spectral sequence wrangling in a local coffee shop. On the way, I was happily surprised to find that my local Asian grocery, Lee’s Oriental, was open on Easter Sunday. So I bought a couple of bags of stuff and made the following off-the-cuff soup, which I record here for future reference:

Saute about half a big head of napa cabbage, a bunch of enoki mushrooms, and 6 cloves garlic in the bottom of the soup pot. Pour a gallon of water on top of it and bring to boil. Stir in about 1/4 c miso (I was using Korean miso, which the shopkeeper — Lee himself? — warned me was very strong; usual miso recipes seem to want more miso per unit of water.) Then add 2 lb soba noodles (I used Sukina brand “Japanese vermicelli”) and boil for about 7 minutes. Three minutes before the end of cooking, add a big handful of bean sprouts (about a cup) and a bunch of scallions, coarsely chopped. One minute before the end of cooking, crack three eggs in the soup and stir furiously until scrambled.

At table, the soup can be garnished with pieces of deep-fried tofu (more precisely: ajitsuke inari age) and sesame oil.

Remarks: The bean sprouts and enoki mushrooms were probably unnecessary; neither really asserted themselves in the final soup. I might have used less soba; it absorbs a lot of soup, so that by the time we were done with dinner, the leftovers were really no longer a soup with noodles, but a noodle dish with a thick glutinous sauce. But it will probably be easier for CJ to eat this way. Soup, per se, remains a challenge for him.