Squash Recipe #9: Butternut and Corn Chowder

Here's a recipe we tried last night for the first time.  DH had seen a recipe in the January issue of the in-flight magazine of the airline he flew on for his work related trip earlier this month, and had thought it sounded good.  So when he got home, he tried to describe it to me, although mainly he could only remember 'chowder', corn kernels, butternut squash, and chicken broth.  My suggesting ingredients, based on my culinary knowledge, while he was trying to remember what he'd read apparently was annoying rather than helpful, and he couldn't recall much other than that he'd thought it would be a good soup.

Being the loving wife I am, and you know, still on the lookout for new ways to use my bumper crop of squash, I got on the internet and attempted to find a recipe using those ingredients.  Without much luck.  Oh, I found numerous butternut corn chowder recipes, but really not any using chicken broth.  Most used vegetable broth, from a can.  I however, wanted to use chicken broth, partly because DH was adamant that's what the recipe he'd seen used, and partly because I have several quarts of homemade chicken broth in the freezer.

Finally, I ended up reading a variety of recipes, pulling common ingredients from them, adding my chicken broth, and winging it.  The chowder came out pretty tasty, so I wrote down exactly what I did in order to be able to replicate it in the future.

Butternut Corn Chowder

2 small butternut squash (about 1 pound each)
1 medium (or 3 small) onions
2 Tbsp veggie oil
2 cups corn kernels (thaw if using frozen corn)
1 1/2 tsp curry 
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 quart chicken broth
1/2 cup heavy cream

1. First, peel, seed and cut your squash into 1" chunks.  Also chop your onion(s).
2. In a pot, heat the veggie oil on medium, then add the onion and squash.  Stir occasionally, until onion gets soft, about 5-6 minutes.  
3. Add the corn and curry powder, and stir well.  Let heat for about 2 minutes, then add salt and pepper.
4. Add the chicken broth, bring to a boil, then turn heat down and simmer, covered, for about 25 minutes until the squash is tender.
5. Remove half of the soup from the pot.  In small batches (about a cup and a half), puree in a blender, returning pureed soup to the pot.
6. Once all the soup is back in the pot, stir in the cream.

At this point, I just turned the heat off and served the soup.  It was hot enough before the addition of the cream that the cream did not cool it off much, so I didn't feel it needed to continue to heat more.

We ate ours with croutons, which was a first for us--having soup with croutons versus crackers, rolls, biscuits, muffins, bread or toast--but is a way many of the chowder recipes I'd seen while trying to find a butternut corn chowder said to serve it.  So I did.  And it was good.

very orange looking chowder