Corn soup with pan fried mushroom

Consider your self warned, this soup took a lot of preparation time!  You need to make 'corn stock' by boiling the de-corned cobs in water for a while (up to an hour).  Then you need to cut and cook what seems like a lot of eschalots - which inevitably leads to me needing extra time for 'crying breaks' while I am cutting!  Throw in the corn kernels, cook for a while, throw in the corn stock, cook for a while, add cream and seasonings, then blend.

None of the steps are hard, but they really are time consuming so this is not going to become a midweek favourite, unless I've made the soup on the weekend before!

The taste, oh the taste.  All the work is worth the taste.  The corn flavour is simply phenomenal.  I actually boiled my cobs for too long, and didn't end up with enough water, so I added some chicken stock.  Did not make a difference (in my opinion).

The mushrooms in the middle were fabulous too.  I had a minor heart attack when I was looking over the recipe (when the soup was simmering towards the end of the cooking time) to figure out the mushrooms and I saw that 'garlic' was on the ingredient list, and I hadn't put garlic in!  Not to worry, the garlic is ONLY to go with the mushrooms. 

The mushrooms didn't really float, although I followed the instructions to plate up.  Oh well, you can see a hint of them to the left, and they added a wonderful flavour to the soup.  I am going to have the leftover soup for lunch at work, sans mushrooms, so it will be a good comparison.

I served it with garlic bread, and salad, because a meal is not compete without salad, no matter how wonderful the corn soup tastes.