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Nathan Duckett: Hello, San Juan Regional Medical Center, this is Farmington Mayor Nate Duckett. I'm here with you today to provide some tricks and tips in the kitchen. I have some favorite recipes. Many of you may know, if you work up on labor and delivery with my wonderful wife, that I pride myself in being a fantastic home chef or cook. And I wanted to share with you today a recipe that my dear friend, Heath VanRiper over at the San Juan Country Club, taught me how to make back in 2006 in a cooking class. He cooked a five-course meal with green chili. And this recipe, which is green chili corn chowder, was the star of that show. So, I've made this recipe multiple times throughout the years since 2006. It's something that I'd like to share with my family, my friends, my coworkers, and I appreciate Roberta Rogers for giving me the opportunity to come here today and share this delicious recipe for you. It's the perfect time of year here in the wintertime to cook up a nice creamy pot of green chili corn chowder. So, I hope that you enjoy it as much as my family and friends do. And we'll just kind of kick it off. So, thanks again to Heath VanRiper for sharing this recipe with me, and now I get to share it with you.

So when considering any new recipe, It's obviously critical that you take the time to read the instructions. Now, we're doing this here in a podcast type form, so to speak. So if you would like this full recipe, I'm more than willing to share it with you as it was shared with me, and you can send me an email at duckett58@me.com, and I will actually send you the printed version of this recipe. But in the meantime, it's really critical that you take the time to understand the recipe, the instructions involved, picturing each step and ensuring that you have, of course, all the ingredients necessary to put all of this together. And with any stew, any soup, there's usually a lot of ingredients. And in this particular recipe, we have a variety of delicious vegetables that you're going to have to prep and chop and clean in order to fit into your soup pot. So, make sure you understand what you need to get at the grocery store. Make a robust grocery list. And then, make sure, give yourself ample time to prep and cook as well. So, you don't want to rush the soup, so to speak.

Now, there are lots of fresh ingredients as I said. It's going to require a lot of chopping and dicing. I am fortunate in my household, over the years, I've had a great group of family members, my wife, my kids who've always come in the kitchen, and I love cooking with them and sharing in the opportunity to make something delicious. So, if you have some people there who can help you out, good for you. But I highly recommend, and this comes from a person who's managed to cut off the tip of his index finger multiple times, please make sure anytime you're cooking anything in the kitchen and you're using a knife, make sure the knife is sharp. Just take that little extra second, get out your sharpener before you start cutting up all these vegetables to make sure that your knife is properly prepped and ready for all of the slicing and dicing that you're going to be doing.

I also would recommend in recipes like this to prep your ingredients prior to beginning of the cooking process. There's just something so much easier and less stressful if you've taken the time to chop your potatoes and chop your carrots and your onions and bacon and have everything ready and ready to go into the pot at the times that they need to go in there, as opposed to starting the cooking process and still prepping as you go. Just coming from my years in the kitchen, that it's best to start with everything ready to cook, so it streamlines it.

So, here are the ingredients. To make one gallon of my version of Chef Heath's green chili corn chowder, first, you're going to need four cups of skinned, diced, and rinsed potatoes. Now, you can make the potatoes any size you want, but I recommend bite size. Because as you get a spoonful of the chowder, you want the potato to fit on the spoon. Russet potatoes are traditionally potatoes that are easy to use. You want to wash those and peel those. But you can also use Yukon golds or red potatoes. They may give a little bit more color to this delicious recipe, and you can leave skin on in those cases, so just make sure you wash your potatoes. Wash all your produce, of course, before you cook with any of it.

You're going to need four cups of heavy cream or whole milk. I mean, heavy cream is the traditional way of making this chowder. Whole milk, a little bit less fat in that. And maybe you want to do less and go to 2% milk, that's your choice. But heavy cream is the original called-for ingredient. Eight cups of chicken stock. You're going to need eight slices of thick-cut bacon, and you're going to dice that bacon. Four shallots, thinly sliced. And so shallots, many of you may not use shallots on a regular basis. These are the smaller red onions. Some people confuse them with scallions, which is your green onion. So, these are the small red onions. And you don't want to dice those. You want to slice those thin. You want long strips, thin long strips of your shallots for your chowder.

You're going to need an eighth of a cup of fresh chopped garlic. That's right, an eighth of a cup. You can even do a little bit more if you wanted to, it's your call. Two large carrots that will be diced. Two large celery sticks that will also be diced. Two cups of chopped corn. You can buy corn on the cob and you can, you know, shuck your corn and cut your corn off of those husks if you want. But you can also buy frozen corn. It depends on how fresh do you want to make this. I prefer to buy the whole corn on the cob and cut the corn right off of the cob on there.

The next ingredient would be two leaks. Again, maybe something you don't use on a regular basis, but they are delicious. They're great in soups. Those leaks will be diced. And I have a recommendation here. Anytime you're cooking with leaks, leaks have a tendency to get a lot of dirt into the inner parts of that plant. So, I usually rinse them off really good as a whole piece and try and get as much of that dirt as I can out of it. But then after I slice and dice those leaks up, I also put them in a colander and I rinse them down really well, because you will find that a lot of dirt gets stuck down on the inside of those leaks. Like a giant green onion is kind of what they look like. But you can find them here locally. I find them in Smith's, Safeway and at Albertsons'.

And two cups of chopped green chilis. This is important, obviously it's green chili corn chowder. The heat that you want to have in your soup is up to you and, obviously, the people that you're making it for. And I find here, every year seasonally, we get our roasted chilies from the store or from Hatch, wherever you get yours from. And you can pick your hot, medium or mild. But I find that in the stores, if you're buying them in the frozen section, you can buy frozen tubs of green chili, that normally they either come in hot or they come in mild. So maybe I'm making it for work or for families, I will do a mild green chili. If I'm making it for myself, we will do a mix of mild and hot green chili. It just depends on who you're making it for and what you think their heat index is, that they would enjoy. So, the idea for me though, anytime I'm cooking with green chili, because I want a little bit of heat, and I think it definitely brings something out in the chowder when you do that.

So, two tablespoons of flour. Now, I've also used Paleo flour. If you're looking for a gluten-free option here, I will use paleo flour. I've used almond flour in the past. Both have worked just as well as the original. So that's, again, up to you. One tablespoon of fresh thyme. One teaspoon of white pepper. And then, kosher salt to taste.

One additional ingredient that I add, and I've just added this now, my friend Michelle Martinez. I just appreciate her, she's a wonderful cook. She just makes tremendous new Mexican dishes. And she's recommended to use chicken noir, which is a powdered chicken bouillon to kind of enhance the flavor of soups like this. So, I will use four teaspoons of chicken noir in my soup. So, that's up to you. That's something I do in my own, but not necessary, just adds a little bit more bright chickeny flavor.

All right. Here's a couple things you're going to need. You're going to need a large pot to boil your potatoes in. We do potatoes a little differently here, and you may adjust your recipe however you would like. This is how Heath has taught me, and that's what I'm passing on to you today. But when it comes to the potato part, you know, we don't want to overcook the potatoes. Sometimes that can overtake the chowder. So, we like to prep the potatoes up front. We put them in an ice bath and then we add them at the end in the soup so that the potato integrity stays intact.

You're going to need a couple smaller pots to warm the cream and the stock. You can warm them together. I've warmed them separately. But the idea is when we add the cream and the stock, we don't want it to be cold. Especially with cream, you have a cold cream and you throw it into a hot pot, that cream can curdle. So, we don't want to do that. So, we warm that slightly before we add it. And then, you can use the same large pot for the soup, as you did to boil the potatoes in, totally up to you, or you can get a second pot for your soup. So, just making sure you have those available for you.

So, here is the instructions. First, prep all your fresh ingredients, so the chopping and the dicing, and get everything set aside. When I'm doing this particular recipe, I combine the celery, the carrots, and the corn in a single bowl because we will be adding those together. Oh, sorry, and the leaks and the garlic, all that's going to be added together at the same time. So, you can really combine those fresh ingredients all in one big bowl to be added. Don't add the green chili into that list. Again, this is just your fresh produce.

You're going to warm the cream and the chicken stock in a separate pot on the stove. That's item number two of the instructions. Third, you're going to place the potatoes in a large pot. And you're going to cover with one inch of water, just enough water so they're covered and that they can be boiled. And you're going to put that on the stove, bring it to a boil and you're going to reduce to simmer and boil those potatoes between 10 to 15 minutes. Now, depending on how big you cut those has a lot to do with how quickly they cook. But just keep a check. At 10 minutes, check one of your potatoes. If it's forked tender, they're done. So, you want to take those out, drain those in a colander. And then, you want to place them in an ice bath. So, you'll need a big bowl with some ice and water. And all we're doing in that is ending the cooking process. We don't want them to cook any further. And then, you set those potatoes aside.

So then, in your soup pot over medium high heat, you're going to add your diced bacon. And you're going to break it up, stir it with your cooking spoon. And we want to render this down until the fat is pulled out of the bacon. So, we want kind of crispy bacon pieces. They're going to be cooked throughout this entire process. We want them to have a good, solid integrity. That's going to take about six to eight minutes roughly for your bacon to be fully cooked. Now, you can drain off at this point some of the bacon fat if you want. Depends on what kind of bacon you're using, how much fat was in there. But this is the base of what I would say is your rue, this is the base of your soup.

So, we're going to add the other ingredients. So, we're going to add flour to that oil, and that's what's going to cook those other components of the dish. So, you can drain some of that off if you want less fat in it. But again, in this recipe, we use that fat to cook the rest of our ingredients in. So if you do pour any off, make sure you keep about three tablespoons or so in the pot for the next step.

So in the next step, we're going to add the corn, the celery, the shallots, the leaks, and the garlic to the pot with the bacon. We're going to stir all those together. We're going to cook on medium heat, so you might want to turn the heat down just a little bit until the corn begins to brown, which is approximately five minutes. Again, you're stirring this on occasion. It doesn't have to be a frequent or constant stir, but we definitely want to make sure that we're keeping that stirred up.

So, the next step, once your corn appears to start browning and everything is cooked, we sprinkle on the flour. I sprinkle that all across the top of the ingredients and I stir that in. And I kind of let that cook and I stir and I let it cook and I stir. And I scrape the bottom of the pan because you will have a tendency for some of that flour to stick to the bottom. And you're going to cook that for about three to five minutes until your flour starts to brown. Again, you can use a flour substitute if you want, something that's gluten-free. Almond and Paleo flour works just fine.

Step nine, you're going to slowly add in the warmed up cream and chicken stock. And you're going to stir those in slowly and make sure you're scraping the bottom of your pot again, because that's where the good stuff is at. And you're going to incorporate all of that in there. Once that's in, we're going to add our green chili, our thyme, our white pepper and, in this case, I would also add my chicken noir, and I'm going to bring that to a simmer. Really important here is that we are not boiling at a high heat. Again, cream at high heat has a tendency to curdle and separate. We want a creamy texture and something that's visually appealing as well. So, make sure that we bring this up to a simmer. We keep it at a simmer and we want keep that at about for five minutes or so. Allow those ingredients to incorporate for probably 10 minutes. You could do 10, 15 minutes. It just depends on the time that you have.

And at that point, step 11, let's add our potatoes. And you're going to stir those in, bring that heat back up a little bit, and cook that for an additional five to seven minutes. At this point, you can let it simmer lower depending on how much you want that potato to be cooked, and I would taste it. If it needs salt, add some kosher salt, that's completely up to you. And really that's it.

At that point, once you feel that the salt content, the taste, everything is there, you should have a very delicious, green chili corn chowder. And bring out your big ladle, get out your baked bread or tortillas, your crackers, whatever you're serving. You can add cheese to it as well. You could add some sliced scallions to the top if you'd like. But you have a delicious pot of green chili corn chowder to share with your family and friends.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this tidbit of information from the kitchen of Nate Duckett. My family and I appreciate all the work that you're doing at San Juan Regional. It just goes without saying that this community is stronger because you're doing what you're doing and we support you in every way that we possibly can. So, enjoy the green chili corn chowder. Again, if you need this recipe, you can reach me at duckett58@me.com, and I will email it over to you.

You all have a great day and keep up the great work. Take care.