As the weather gets colder, we begin to think in terms of  foods that are hot and hearty.  Nothing is more comforting than a warm bowl of clam chowder served with some crusty sour dough bread.  Baker’s Man isn’t much of a soup fan, but he loves chowder.  After growing up in San Francisco, he is  also very fond of sour dough bread.

We have a small food storage cache.  I try to pull from it and add to it regularly.   I decided that I wanted to see if I would be able to create something new from the items in our food storage.  The idea I came up with was Clam Chowder.

Among the canned meat in my pantry,  there is almost always canned clams.  They have many uses from linguine with white clam sauce to chowder.   Another thing that I have in the pantry on a regular basis are dehydrated soups we can take camping.   I looked at the soup and I looked at the clams and I had an idea.  Why not combine the two to make clam chowder?

After reviewing the ingredients on the package of dehydrated potato soup, I realized that it had almost everything in it that I would add to scratch made clam chowder.   It was at this point when I knew with certainty that my idea would work. The only missing ingredient was celery.

Armed with my ingredients, I rushed into the kitchen.

I finely chopped two celery stalks.  I added these along with two tablespoons of butter to the bottom of my soup pot.  I sauteed the celery until it began to carmelize.   If you don’t have any fresh celery, you can also use a couple tablespoons of dehydrated celery, but you just toss it into the pot with the dehydrated soup mix.

I added the clam juice from the cans of clams (1 1/2 cups)  as well as the balance of liquid called for on the package of soup mix.  (The recipe called for 8 cups of water, but since I had added 1 1/2 cups of clam juice, I only added 6 1/2 cups water.)

I waited until this mixture came to a boil, then I whisked in the potato soup mix.  Once this was well incorporated, I poured in the clams for my 3 cans.  Once it returned to a boil, I lowered the heat and allowed the chowder to simmer for 15 minutes as directed on the soup pouch.

When it was ready, I ladled it into sour dough bread bowls and served it with a shrimp ceasar salad on the side.

It was very filling, and it was delicious.  Give it a try.