Winter Appetizers - Miniature Shrimp Chowder Cups

In the run-up to New Year's Eve, we had seen Hubert Keller prepare an appetizer that sliced fingerling potatoes into small cups that held herbed goat cheese for a party appetizer.

 It got us thinking, what if we created mini-soup bowls using the same technique?

Soup...in a Cup..a tiny potato cup.

Flash forward a month...Fair Food Farmstand had some nice looking fingerling potatoes for sale, which we picked up an then sliced into cylinders about 1 inch in length. We scooped out the innards of each potato cylinder, then baked them at 375 until they were soft enough for a toothpick to pass through.

BRAAAAAAAIIIIINSSS

Whole Food had some really nice Maine Shrimp for sale; we hadn't tried these before out trip, oddly enough, to Maine, but the flavor of these diminutive shellfish was powerful enough to flavor the soup and still fit inside each potato cup.

The soup itself used a base broth of butter, shallots, fennel seed & 2 cups of water boiled with the Maine Shrimp and some shrimp shells that we had kept in the fridge just to flavor stock. The Maine shrimp were pulled as soon as they were done...took maybe 1 minute...then shocked in an ice bath. The innards of the potato were also added to the soup stock.

Once the potato scrapings were cooked, a 1/4 cup of cream was added to the broth, which was then spooned into the potato cups and topped off with shrimp and parsley. A shallow pool of soup accompanied the potato cups, along with the excess shrimp. The Maine Shrimp were a perfect fit for the scale of these little, two-bite appetizers.