KTT: Base Recipes

I love base recipes. One of my favorite cookbooks specializes in them. Not only do base recipes leave all sorts of room for improvisation, but they let you know what the minimum requirements for the recipe are--what you really need to have on hand for it to come out well. So often, though, I find a recipe I like the idea of, but don't have many of the ingredients or the ingredients fall pretty wide of my usual grocery shopping patterns. What I need is a base recipe.


One such occasion was a recent encounter I had with the Smoked Salmon Chowder recipe on Tammy's Recipes. It looks divine. It makes me wish I had a scratch-n-sniff computer screen. BUT, the likelihood of my finding (let alone being able to afford) all the ingredients was somewhere between slim and none. What to do?


Naturally, I headed to one of my favorite online tools: Recipezaar. There I looked at a variety of well rated fish chowder recipes in search of their common ground. By comparing all that information, I got a pretty good idea of what the recipe needed and what it wanted. I decided to start with needs and experiment from there.

The following recipe (which was super easy and took only one pot) resulted. I'm eager to try it with other kinds of fish and adding in various herbs and vegetables.


Ingredients:


1T butter or oil
1 onion chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 whole, cleaned, mild, white fish (I used a tilapia)--about 1 pound
3 small potatoes (or 1 large one) with skin, diced
pepper flakes, to taste (I used about 1/2 tsp)
2T oatmeal
3/4 c whole milk
2 tsp salt
1 tsp prepared mustard

1. Saute the onion and garlic in oil or butter in a large pot. When the onion becomes translucent, transfer to a bowl and set aside.
2. In the same pot (without washing it out first) place the whole fish and cover with water (about 4-5 cups). Bring to a boil and then simmer for about 10 minutes or until fish is thoroughly cooked. Carefully remove fish from water, reserving the water (you'll want to poke around in the water a little later to make sure there aren't any scales floating around in there!)
3. Once the fish has cooled separate the meat from the carcass, discarding bones and skin.
4. Put onion, garlic, potatoes, and pepper flakes into the fish water and bring to a boil. Boil uncovered until potatoes are almost done.
5. Add fish meat back into pot, and continue to cook until potatoes are done.
6. Stir in oatmeal.
7. Being careful to keep it from scorching to the bottom of the pot, continue to boil until soup is reduced to a consistency just thicker than desired. Stir in milk, salt, and mustard.
8. Serves four as a side dish/appetizer or two as a main course

In future, I would add black pepper and rosemary and serve with lemon juice.

The most time consuming part of this recipe is deboning the fish. The rest of it takes probably about half an hour to do. DH heartily approved of this chowder, and I served it with thick slices of bread for dipping. Under other circumstances, I would also serve a green salad with a vinaigrette alongside it to make a more complete meal.




For more tips and tricks, visit Tammy's Recipes for Kitchen Tip Tuesday and We Are THAT Family for Works for Me Wednesday.