Crab Chanterelle Chowder

SO, as many of you know, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel extensively throughout my career, and one of my favorite things to do – besides eating, tasting, collecting recipes and cooking in people’s homes – is to visit grocery stores!  and find all kinds of nice ingredients that I can’t get at home.  This was even more important 25+ years ago when I started doing this – as many of the eclectic ingredients you can get today online were not available to the average American.  One of my first “finds” was porcini bouillon in Italy – I LOVED that stuff.

As I traveled to Gent, Belgium regularly for most of those 25+ years, I had a few favorites – their “store” mayo is WAY better than US store mayo – so it was the only mayo in my fridge for many years (see recent home-made mayo post) – and of course samurai sauce for your frites!.   Another fave was chanterelle mushrooms in a jar.

Chanterelles are just lovely mushrooms – if you can get them fresh, they are amazing sautéed in butter (and put on anything!), but at DLM in Dayton, they are priced like gold – on the rare occasion that they even have them.   way too expensive to use in soup.  I’ve never had much luck with the dried ones – tho perhaps I just am not rehydrating well (as the dried chili’s worked really well in the Mole – see that previous post).   But an inexpensive jar of chanterelles in water was a staple in my pantry – and I used it for one of my favorite soups – Crab and Corn Chowder with Bacon and Chanterelle Mushrooms – now what’s not to like about THAT recipe.

All that being said, I no longer travel to Belgium regularly (a tragedy on SO many levels – one being that  a large percentage of my FRIENDS live there!)  As I’d not made the soup for years, I was craving it and thus ordered some $10 can of chanterelles from Amazon (was it worth it? not sure,  I’m going to try to rehydrate dried ones again I think before ordering more).

But the soup was amazing – corn cob broth, bacon garnish and all.   every bit as good as I remembered. As it’s a straight up recipe from epicurious AND I’ve made it many, many times, I’m going to add the link to the recipe page also.   Bon Appetit!

PS:  making Spring Chicken soup today for the 2nd time – if it turns out well, I will then post THAT recipe as well!

• This topic was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Vicki.