Jessica's Famous Seafood Chowder

hehe this is totally in my arsenal of jessica's go to dishes cause it's sooooo easy, and soooo tasty, and soooo satisfying and a crowd pleasure for sure.  the only pain is chopping up all those dang veggies, but otherwise, its a completely painless process.

it all started one day when I was in the gym catching up with my food network (cause i only get basic cable now :( ) and  it wasThrowdown with Bobby Flay: Salmon Chowder challenge with these guys at Seattle's Pike Place, and i was like, this is so easy! Im gonna make it.  Bobby used crab stock and crab meat, and the pike place guys used a shrimp/prawn based stock, but i chose to use lobster, cause I wanted to eat lobster meat.  This is actually my second go at making this, so this time this was a 3 lb lobster (my first one was 3.5).

So step 1: Cook and eat a delicious lobster and save the shells, brains, goo, everything. 

While i was cooking the lobster, i was simultaneously cooking a shit load of bacon for the chowder. Funny useless fact, we ate the lobster with a lemon bacon butter.... how awesome is that! haha.  

Threw the lobster shells in with water, 1 lemon cut in half, onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 bay leaves, fresh thyme, celery, corn husks, couple peppercorns, salt, and.... i think that's it. Cooked it for an hour and a half.

And here it is, an hour and a half after, check out all its guts against the pot... mmmmm. lobster flavoured water.

At the same time i was making the stock, i was chopping up all the veggies... its a tiresome activity, and no a slap chop would not help. I used 1 large carrot, 1 large onion, 4 stalks of celery, 3 yukon gold, and 3 baking potatoes (they used yukon gold on the show, and i know why, it retains its shape and bite), kernal from 4 corn cobs, I "sweated" it in my roux (butter + flour, is that what you're even suppose to do? who cares). and then my bacon!

Strained the sock and added it to my pile of veggies and let it boil for a while... then i added half and half cream and all my seafood which were: Salmon Chunks, Seabass chunks, and scallops. What i should have done, was fried the scallops in the bacon fat... next time.

And there you go, seafood chowder for your family and your neighbours. which i did feed as well. haha.

Ta da! I ate this for like...6 straight meals.... if it wasnt THAT GOOD, it would be down the toilet. .. yeah i ended up giving it away to my neighbour... hahaha. but still... its THAT GOOD.