Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

that have been in the interior parts of this area since I was a little girl.

My mother’s generous friend Felipe brought us a bushel of white corn on Sunday. Picked that morning, it had the sweetest taste you can imagine. We feasted on it for dinner, but then I started thinking of new ways to combine it with other locally produced goodness, and I came up with this corn-crab chowder recipe. It utilizes the corn, plus sweet blue crabs, which are being harvested here right now, not to mention red bell peppers and jalapeño peppers, readily available anywhere. I hope you’ll try this at home, and let me know what you think.

She glanced over at the notes she’d scrawled in the kitchen earlier in the day. The corn-crab chowder really had been a triumph. She’d diced sweet yellow onions, jalapeños and red peppers, and some garlic, then sautéed them in bacon drippings in the cast-iron Dutch oven. Rochelle had grumbled about what a pain in the ass it was to cut all the corn off the cobs, but once she’d dumped them in the bacon drippings, along with diced tiny new potatoes and added chicken broth, the aroma wafting through the Sandbox kitchen had been irresistible. After the corn had simmered for twenty minutes or so, Grace had dumped in the crab. It was just back-fin crab, because Rochelle insisted you really didn’t need lump claw meat for a soup, and, although crab was in season, her supplier still charged her $6.99 a pound.

Half-and-half was carefully added to the corn and crab mixture, along with a generous sprinkling of Old Bay seasoning—at Rochelle’s insistence. As that simmered another five minutes, Grace diced up the crisp bacon she’d set aside from the pan drippings.

She’d gone outside to snip chives from the pots of herbs she’d started growing by the Sandbox front entrance, and when she reentered the kitchen, she caught her mother, standing over the stove, the Old Bay tin poised over the pot of chowder.

“Hey!” Grace protested, snatching the can from Rochelle’s hand.

“I was just adjusting the seasoning.” Rochelle dropped a wooden spoon into the big stainless steel sink.

“It doesn’t need any more adjustment,” Grace said, through gritted teeth. “Do you know how much salt is in that stuff? Not to mention the sodium in the bacon?”

“I don’t need to know. I just know you can’t make soup—especially soup with corn and crab, without a good douse of Old Bay,” Rochelle retorted. “I’ve been making soup for way longer than you’ve been alive, young lady, so don’t go lecturing me on salt. Or on cooking.”

Grace bit her lip. She wanted to remind her mother that she was already on medication for high blood pressure and that her doctor had been urging her to cut back on sodium. Instead, she began snipping the chives into a milk-glass custard cup. “If you want more Old Bay in your soup, you can keep the shaker by your bowl. But please don’t add it to the pot. Please?”

“Hmmph.” Rochelle began tossing dirty dishes into the sink, a sure sign that she was miffed.

Ignoring her mother’s tantrum, Grace found two old ice cream sundae glasses and placed each on a white plate. She started for the bar, to grab the sherry bottle, then, quietly, picked up the Old Bay can and took it with her. Just in case.

She turned the burner down to low and added a splash of sherry to the soup. Tasted, then added another splash.

A few minutes later, she made diagonal slices in the loaf of Cuban bread that had been delivered to the restaurant that morning, dribbled olive oil over the slices, and ran them under the broiler just long enough to toast them a light brown.

She placed a slice of bread on each plate, then dipped a ladle into the Dutch oven, carefully spooning the chowder into each sundae glass. A sprinkling of chives and diced bacon topped each glass.

Grace grabbed her camera and began snapping photos.

“Who serves crab chowder in a sundae glass?” Rochelle asked.

“I just like the way it looks,” Grace said, snapping away. “Eccentric.”

“Weird,” Rochelle muttered, watching from the sink. “Are we eating or shooting?”

“Eating,” Grace said, setting the camera down. “But if the finished product tastes as good as it looks, I think this will make a terrific blog post.”

She grabbed two blue and white striped dish towels from the stack on the stainless steel prep counter and draped them over her arm before picking up the soup dishes and pushing her way through the swinging door into the bar.

Grace unfolded the dish towels and spread them out as a placemat on the bar. She grabbed a couple of wineglasses, poured in some white wine, and stood back to look. Finally, she added a paper-thin slice of lemon to the side of each plate for a shot of color. Pleased with the effect, she went back for her camera and took a couple more exposures. “Let’s eat,” she called, over her shoulder.

Rochelle eyed the place settings at the bar. “Pretty fancy, just for Saturday lunch for the two of us.”

“You eat with your eyes, as well as your tastebuds, you know,” Grace said, refusing to let her mother bait her.

“Hmmph,” Rochelle said. But she dipped her spoon into the soup, tasted, and closed her eyes.

“Well?”

Rochelle took another bite of the soup. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” With a fingertip, she fished a small limp green fragment from her soup and held it up for Grace to see.

“What’s this?”

“Sorry,” Grace said. “It’s just a sprig of tarragon. I was supposed to remove it before I served the soup, but I got distracted. So … you really like it?”

“I do,” Rochelle said. She dipped a piece of toasted bread into the soup and chewed.

Grace ate slowly, pausing to make notes on her ever-present yellow legal pad. Next time, she thought, she might do cheese toasts to go along with the soup, maybe adding slivers of goat cheese to