Day 25: A Mostly Creamy but Oh-So-Yummy Dinner (Asian Corn Soup, Crispy Potato Fans)

I have reached the point in my experiment where I am going to have to start getting creative with my cooking because 1) I have now blogged about most of the things that we usually eat and am running out of favorite foods to share and 2) I am running out of my "staple" ingredients. Tonight I peered into my kitchen freezer no less than three times and my garage freezer twice before I gave up hope of finding inspiration there and pulled out my stack of "Recipes I'd Like to Try" printouts.

I think anyone who has ever looked at a magazine or flipped through a cookbook has a pile like this: scraps of paper torn out from magazines, recipes jotted down on napkins, or if you surf the web, a stack of 8-1/2 x 11 sheets of internet printouts. Maybe you're like me: my cookbooks are studded with color-coded post-its which have lost their significance due to the vast number of recipes that have been flagged.

Near the top of the stack I found the recipe for Asian Corn and Chicken Soup, from cookscountry.com. As I mentioned in my posting on favorite foodie websites, this is one of my  go-to sites when I want to try making something new. I love it so much that I happily pay the annual subscription fee to gain access to the entire website and it is worth every penny. (Its sister site, americastestkitchen.com, is equally worthy of the subscription cost but since I own the TV show cookbook, I don't need the online access.)

Back to the soup... After a quick glance at the recipe, I realized why I had printed it out: It was made from things I almost always have in my pantry. This soup is surprisingly simple and I was skeptical that it would be much good as I was putting it together - coconut milk, corn, chicken, and chicken broth are the main ingredients. It just didn't sound like much but it turned out to have wonderful, robust flavor. I didn't have any limes and the soup was delicious without them, but next time I will be sure to add a few squeezes of fresh juice as I love a touch of citrus in my Asian dishes.

I have several pounds of those huge baking potatoes leftover from Thanksgiving that need to be eaten up soon. I like potatoes but given a choice, I'd rather get my carb calories from grains like rice, pasta and bread. However, these potatoes cost me a small fortune due to their gigantic size and so I cannot let them go to waste. On cookscountry.com, I found an intriguing preparation for baked potatoes and one I had never seen before, Crispy Baked Potato Fans.

These potatoes are a bit of work but I have to say, THEY WERE FANTASTIC! Absolutely and totally delicious. As you can see from the photo, you cut the potatoes into a fan shape and microwave until they are soft. Then you brush the slices with a mixture of olive oil, salt and pepper and roast until crispy. Then they are stuffed with a breadcrumb and cheese mixture and toasted under the broiler until the cheese melts and the breadcrumbs are toasty brown. YUMMMM!!! This potato was so good that I think it deserves a second photo:

Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the meal was mostly white/creamy colored (a big no-no in  menu-planning and from a nutritional standpoint) until everything was nearly done and we were ready to eat. Next time I will be sure to include a green salad in this meal.

Busy Mom Modifications and Tips

• I didn't make any modifications to the soup; it is pretty straightforward as written. You do have to keep a close eye on it though because coconut milk will separate if boiled at too high a heat for too long. The soup takes a bit of time because it should be simmering most of the time.
• The online instructions for cutting the potato introduced me to a great tip. Line up chopsticks on both sides of the potato and that will keep you from cutting all the way through as you cut the slices.
• The instructions call for you to toast the breadcrumbs in the oven. I just toasted the bread in the toaster and then crumbled it up.
• I did not have any Monterey Jack so I used Stilton, a mild blue cheese, instead. SOOOO GOOOD! Because I was using a cheese that was stronger than the recipe called for, I left out the paprika.
• I was not in the mood to pull out my food processor to make breadcrumbs so I just crumbled the toast by hand resulting in somewhat bigger chunks of bread. The Stilton was also not easy to crumble so I had chunks of cheese as well. As yummy as this sounds, it was hard to stuff the potatoes with the big chunks. You want to get the stuffing all the way down to the bottom of and in-between the slices and the crumbs and cheese need to be fine pieces in order to do that.

The Results

The Geek and I both marveled at how flavorful both the soup and the potatoes were.

Ratings

• Difficulty: The soup was easy; the potatoes medium.
• Time to prepare: Soup 30 min.; Potatoes 45 min.
• Prognosis: Will definitely be making these again

My Shopping List

Nothing - I made do with what I had on hand.

The Tally

• The day's tally: $0
• Total this week so far: $0
• Total this month, to date: $36