This Classic Corn Chowder Is Quite Resourceful

One of my favorite things my grandma taught me was mottainai, the Japanese philosophy of being resourceful and not wasting anything that might be useful. She’d save strips of pretty wrapping paper and yarn scraps to make beautiful collages; in the kitchen, the smallest pieces of leftover salmon or beef would be made into onigiri or ochazuke. Mottainai is just as much about being creative as it is about being careful.

There’s a good bit of mottainai built into Mark Bittman’s five-star basic corn chowder. For one, the corn cobs simmer away, forming a flavorful stock for your chowder, while you prep the rest of your ingredients. Two, while Mark calls for bacon and cream to add body to his chowder, he notes that the seasonings and add-ins are flexible. I’m going to try his suggestion to add curry powder and ginger, and swap rice for the potato — I always have cooked rice that needs using up.

By the way, the corn cob trick is useful for pasta, too: Hetty Lui McKinnon flavors the water with cobs before adding noodles in her soy-butter corn ramen. I now do this with any corny pasta recipe, like Dan Pelosi’s linguine with zucchini, corn and shrimp and Hetty’s vegan tantanmen.

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Basic Corn Chowder

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More mottainai! I let myself go overboard buying summer fruits because I know whatever isn’t good enough for eating out of hand will be beautiful in a cooked (or baked) dish. These chicken thighs with fresh plum agrodolce, from Samantha Seneviratne, look like a delicious home for plums that are a bit too tart or a touch too grainy for snacking; they’ll find their calling being gently simmered with shallots, honey, sherry vinegar and chile flakes.

There’s a stand at my farmers’ market that always has baskets of soft, discounted “sauce tomatoes” shelved beneath the pert, shiny non-sauce tomatoes. I almost exclusively buy those sauce tomatoes for recipes like Yotam Ottolenghi’s smoky confit tomato and lemon pasta, where they further collapse and confit in a pool of olive oil in the oven.

Here’s Tara Holland’s air-fryer zucchini and Lidey Heuck’s roasted zucchini, because the best way to not waste zucchini is to turn it golden and crisp-edged and supremely snackable.

Similarly, I suggest making extra of Colu Henry’s maple and miso sheet-pan salmon with green beans for lovely lunch rice bowls the next day. Or, if there’s not enough leftover salmon for a full meal, do what my grandma did and shred up what you have for salmon onigiri.

Lastly, I can’t think of an obvious mottainai connection for halo-halo, that glorious Filipino sundae of ice cream, shaved ice, mango, sweetened condensed and evaporated milks, and all manner of jarred treats: coconut gel, palm fruit, red mung beans, sago pearls, ube jam. But I will say, despite a longish ingredient list, nothing ever goes to waste. As long as I have ice cream in my freezer, I can keep making happy little halo-halos out of the bits and bobs that remain in my fridge.