Forecast Calls for More Corn, So Make Some Chowder

We’ll likely be getting some more corn in this week’s share, though probably not the dozens of ears we got last week. Hope you’re not bored with corn yet; it’s a delicious vegetable and ever so versatile. How many other vegetables can you make soup, bread, and pudding out of?

We’ve already had a corn pudding recipe, and you can make corn bread from your favorite recipe and just throw in some corn kernels. So, today let’s look at soup.
Chowder, actually, and this one even uses the cobs. It’s adapted from a recipe I found on SimplyRecipes.com.

Corn Chowder
1 Tablespoon butter
2 slices of bacon
1 yellow onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
4 ears of sweet corn, kernels removed from cobs (but keep the cobs, too)
3½ cups milk
1 medium-sized Yukon gold potato, peeled and diced
1 bell pepper (red or orange is good, but green is okay too)
1 teaspoon chopped basil
½ teaspoon sea salt
Ground pepper
Small bag of frozen cooked shrimp (optional)

Fry the bacon in your soup pot; take out the bacon strips and drain. Add the butter to the soup pot and then add the onion and sauté for about 4 or 5 minutes, until it is soft but not brown. Add the chopped celery and cook for another 4 or 5 minutes. Then break the corn cobs in half and add them to the saucepan. Add the milk and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a very low simmer, cover the pot, and cook for 30 minutes. Make sure the heat is as low as possible to prevent scalding the milk on the bottom of the pan.

Discard the cobs, turn up the heat again, and add the potatoes, chopped bell pepper, chopped basil, sea salt, and ground pepper to taste, bring to a simmer and reduce the heat to maintain a simmer for 15 minutes. Then raise the heat again, add the corn kernels and the optional shrimp (defrosted a bit by running water over them). Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 5 to 7 minutes, until corn is cooked and shrimp are heated through. Crumble the reserved bacon over the top of the soup, stir in, and serve.

I decided to add the shrimp after I made the chowder because the smell of the soup while it was cooking reminded me of a shrimp and corn chowder I had made in the past; I’m sure this would be perfectly delicious without the shrimp, too.

Make Pudding Out of Some of That Corn

We got a lot of corn in the share this week. I mean a LOT of corn. Most people love corn on the cob, and this is some tasty stuff that lends itself to just boiling and eating. But variety is also the spice of life, so here’s something a little different, a great way to use up some of the corn from this week’s share from Nancy Sullivan. If you want a more savory version, add some pepper (sweet and piquante), and onion.

Fresh Corn Pudding
Ingredients
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 tablespoons white sugar
• ground black pepper to taste
• 2 cups milk
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 cups fresh corn

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Place butter in a 9x13 inch baking pan and set in oven to melt.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, salt, sugar, pepper, milk and flour. When mixture is smooth, stir in corn. Remove pan from oven when butter is melted. Pour butter into corn mixture and stir well. Pour corn mixture into baking pan.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour or until set in center and golden brown on top.

Another alternative: I saw a recipe for a Thai corn pudding dessert (how did corn get to Thailand from the worlds of the Maya and Aztecs)? Keep the corn pudding sweet, without onion, etc. As soon as it comes out of the oven, top with coconut cream that you have heated with a little salt in a small saucepan.
—Nancy Sullivan

Okra Even Inspires Poetry

Okra is such a delectable vegetable, it has even inspired poetry and song. Chris Smithers' "I Got No Love" is sung by a peddler of vegetables who has "Okra, enough to choke ya, and beans of every kind." (Sound familiar?) And the Florida Okra Fest (slogan, "Celebrate the Pod) features "The Okra Song," which begins:


Okra it gets slimy
When you cut it with a knife
Love is just as slippery
You gotta hang on for dear life

I even came across a poem that mentions okra by a well-known Cincinnati poet, Nikki Giovanni. (She was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but grew up in Lincoln Heights.)

Knoxville Tennessee

I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy's garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep

--Nikki Giovanni

Poet Farmers

I was thinking about poems about farming, and decided that there are probably more poet farmers than, say, science-fiction writing farmers (does Stephen King dare to raise corn, do you suppose?) Wendell Berry comes first to my mind; Suellyn Shupe posted a poem by Berry on the blog earlier this season. I like “The Man Born to Farming” especially. Here’s an excerpt:

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

Walt Whitman wrote a wonderful short poem called “A Farm-Picture”:

Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding;
And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away.

Then there was Carl Sandburg, a fellow who knew something about the Midwest with its fields of grain and pastures of cattle. He apparently caught the corn laughing at him once, and that inspired him to write “The Laughing Corn,” of which this is an excerpt:

There was a high majestic fooling
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.
And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn
There will be high majestic fooling.
The ears ripen in late summer
And come on with a conquering laughter,
Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

But enough about corn! One of my favorite poets, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, wrote an ode to tomatoes that I really like; I think I’ll post the entire poem as a separate blog entry (done--here's the link). Other poets who were farmers . . . Robert Burns (he wrote a poem about turning up a mouse nest with his plow), Henry David Thoreau (his poem “I Am the Autumnal Sun” has some nice harvest images in it), and Robert Frost.

It has been said about Robert Frost that it is hard to tell which was his vocation and which his avocation—he was dedicated to both farming and poetry. The illustration at the top of this blog entry is a woodcut by J. J. Lanke of Frost's farm in Derry, New Hampshire. But even he occasionally was a bit overwhelmed by the harvest; I like his poem, “After Apple-Picking,” when he realizes just how many apples he has. It reminds me a bit of the yield of the pear tree in the Schenks’ yard:

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

Do you have a favorite farming poem, or a favorite poet farmer? Let us know!

Apples & Corn

The harvest on Saturday included apples and corn, both welcome. However, they weren't grown at the Enright CSA. We don't have any apple trees yet (but give us time); they were from an orchard in Bridgetown. And corn requires a lot of space, so maybe when we get some more growing space we can grown our own. But it's nice that we are able to support other local farms by buying some produce to add to the shares a few times a year.

I had some of the corn in a bean dip at a party at fellow CSA member Tina Michel's house on Saturday night, and I will admit to picking up the last kernels on my plate with my fingers when my tortilla chips were gone, it was so tasty. I noticed that another young CSA member enjoyed her corn straight from the cob. (Thanks for sharing that photo, Michael Frazier!) I had an apple for breakfast this morning, and it was great, too, crisp and sharply sweet.

It was altogether a beautiful share this week, with the first of the peppers (the purple peppers are almost too pretty to eat--almost), a tomato, and even an eggplant on the share table. I think it's been our most colorful share so far, and it made a feast for the eyes, set out for pickup (good job, team) even before we all took it home to cook up a few feasts for the table.