We all have a food that we genuinely love so much, and at every long-awaited occasions when we put a bite in our mouth, we wonder to ourselves, why don’t we make that more often?   Yes, well, that to me is grilled peanut butter sandwich.  This… this, my friends, is not that.  This is clam chowder, and it’s something else entirely.

I know exactly why I don’t make clam chowders more often.  I know exactly the moment in time, the passage being said, the scarred memory in my head which still hurts, that all together forged a mental blockade in between me, myself, and my beloved clam chowders, for all these years.  It was a particular spring day in New York, when I was just about to order my favourite “soup” from a popular bakery with a friend of mine:

“Do you wanna know why their clam chowder is so good?”
“No?”
“The other day, I saw them making it where they dunked an enormous brick of butter into the pot at the very end.”
“How enormous…?”
“Like big.  Big.  Like drinking butter.”

Head down, belly tucked, I walked away from that bakery without my clam chowder that day.  In fact, if you can believe it, I sort of didn’t get my clam chowder for many years that followed…  Like I said, it still hurts.  But before you judge me, please keep in mind that this was in my 20’s when bikini-season was still very much a possibility, when dating was still a verb, not a noun.  And most importantly, this was before I started this blog…