Crock Pot Corn Chowder

The idea for this corn chowder recipe came from a church cookbook. Seeing as how I have about 20-30 of them, I get lots of ideas there. 🙂 Some of the ideas turn out good. Some of them don’t turn out at all and I have to scrape them out with the assistance of a chisel and a sledgehammer.

I used to feel bad about this fact – until I read that most great chefs get their groundbreaking ideas from something they see somewhere else. They just put their spin on it, add something new, or use a different technique. So, if a chef can do it, so can I! Take a seat, Chef Boyardee! After all, no recipe will ever come out that hasn’t been made before. I just have to Stacify them.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

The original corn chowder recipe called for: margarine, hash brown patties, cream style corn in a can, and cream of mushroom soup. Well, I don’t use margarine (what’s the point?), cream style corn in can reminds me of something Dottie threw up (sorry for the visual again), I don’t buy hash brown patties, and well, you know I make my cream-of soups.

I totally understand the lure of using all these pre-prepped ingredients. They are easy. You just chuck them in your crock, give a little stir, and you’re done. It’s like its own mini miracle. But really, you don’t need that. Making things from scratch really isn’t HARD…it just takes advance planning. Buy frozen corn instead of canned – buy potatoes instead of hash browns – make your own cream soup. It’s not hard – and guess what? It’s probably CHEAPER! Whew – I felt the Spirit – did you feel that?

NOTE: This was my last bag of frozen conventional corn. We’ve switched to organic corn products because how of we feel about GMO products…and almost all corn is GMO now. I thought that organic corn would be a lot more than regular, but it’s not. At my store it was only $.20 more a bag. Not too shabby. Some organic item prices make me cry and feel like I’m going to hyperventilate. This was a surprising discovery. This is why we are Poorganic.

Yes, it takes more time to chop veggies yourself versus adding a can of something-something. But, a potato is a potato is a potato. Can you tell me what’s in your hash brown patties? I think if you read the ingredients, you might be surprised. They’re putting salt and sugar in everything these days. Do you know why? I recently read in The Kitchen Counter Cooking School that manufacturers actually formulate their products to make you crave more – they create items that don’t fill you up and make you crave more so you buy tons of their products. CONSPIRACY! CONSPIRACY!

Switching to potatoes instead of potato products is such an easy change to make – it falls in line with my Change One Thing At a Time philosophy. And guess what? Potatoes are almost always cheaper than their processed counterparts. BOOYA!

Most of the time, when a recipe calls for cream of whoknowswhat, I can use sour cream with great results. CREAM-of and sour CREAM. See? It makes perfect sense to me. I know – your mind is totally blown right now. Cream all around! I love cream – it makes life happy. Butter is made from cream. It all makes sense now. I must stop before I get too giddy!

So, anyway…here is a yummy corn chowder. Proof that SAD (Standard American Diet) recipes are easy to convert to whole-food cheap recipes…most of the time. There are always exceptions – thankfully this wasn’t one of them, otherwise there would be no post today.