It's still 1943!

I got my day off to a swinging start with The Swingin' Years. Usually I love listening to the whole thing every Saturday and Sunday, but today I woke up so late that all I heard were the last few songs on the countdown as I chugged my coffee.

But it was my favorite year, 1943! This week, five of the top ten songs were performed by Der Bingle, but the number one song was Paper Doll by the Ink Spots, and man, I found myself humming that song. All. Damned. Day.

The 1943 theme got me thinking about my poor neglected Victory Garden, so I spent the rest of the day yanking up the weeds and remnants of the summer tomatoes and tilling in compost for the winter cabbages and peas. It was sunny but there was a definite chill in the air, and the wind started picking up just after noon, blowing the fallen leaves everywhere. It was apple pie weather; stew weather. You need something chunky and warm to cast the chill out of your joints at the end of the day.

As I planned where the root vegetables were going to go, I started to get really hungry, imagining roasted parsnips or beets from my winter garden accompanying a baked chicken, or all the carrots, peas and potatoes filling up a stew. Then, as I was clearing away some forgotten corn stalks, it occurred to me that I had the making of a great stew sitting in my freezer right now! The corn crop this summer was AMAZING. What a difference planting corn in a block makes! I blanched and froze most of it, hoping to make corn bread and soups this winter. Well, no time like the present! And just a few days ago I went past a recipe for Corn Chowder in one of my ration recipe cookbooks. Gosh that sounds good! Now let me see, where was it...


Next week, if you're good, I'll make some of those bizarro sandwich fillings for you. They're really not bad, I've tried a few. But I digress!

In the spirit of true rationing, I had to make do with a few things. The first thing that went through my mind was "FOUR CUPS OF MILK! THAT'S MY WHOLE WEEKS RATIONS!" So in the spirit of making do, I used two cups of fresh milk, and enough powdered milk and water to make two more cups. The thing about powdered milk and powdered eggs is that they're awful when you use them as directed and consume them as stand-alones, but if you bury them in a recipe they are undetectable. And so it was with the stew. The milk situation turned out just right. Also I was out of onions, which has never happened before. Finding them growing out or turning to mush happens from time to time, but I can't ever remember actually being OUT of them before. Luckily I had some chopped, dried onions in the pantry, and while I certainly didn't get the same magical aroma that real onions and bacon fat would provide, the resulting flavor of the soup was quite nice.


The resulting soup was a little insipid at first. You have to use a LOT of salt to get it up to snuff, and even then I thought it smelled wonderful but still tasted a little boring. I added a teaspoon of butter smashed up with a teaspoon of flour to make a roux. That added some body and improved the taste a bit, but it was still a little boring and I was just about at capacity for the salt and pepper, I didn't want to use any more. I searched a few other recipes and found garlic powder to be a recurring ingredient, so I tried about a 1/4 teaspoon. That made it sparkle, but there was still a little something missing. It smelled wonderful but the sweetness of the corn just wasn't shining through. Aha! Sweetness! I put in a teaspoon of sugar and stirred it in. I tasted it. Oooh, yes...that's MUCH better! So for all those who just skipped to the bottom of my paragraph, follow the recipe but add some garlic salt and a little sugar to the finished product.

I don't have any crackers on hand, and I was going to make bread but I ran out of strength. Plus, the soup cooked up very fast, about a half an hour. I still have a few rolls hanging around that didn't get used up for Thanksgiving dinner, so they made an excellent garnish. Tasty too.

I wish you could taste it, it's really quite good, and it makes enough for four bowls of soup plus leftovers for another day.



Further adventures for my time travelling friends:

The Swingin' Years can be heard Saturday and Sunday Mornings from 6 to 9 am Pacific Time. If you've never heard it, it's really a treat. The host, Chuck Cecil, has been running this show for fifty years now, and he serves up each song with trivia, listener-supplied memories from letters, interviews with the Bandleaders and singers that he's conducted over the decades, and stories about the ballrooms they played in. The only commercials are station breaks and the occasional pledge breaks every month or two. It's a first-class memory trip and I don't know what I'll ever do when Chuck finally kicks the bucket.