Sausage, Potato, and Corn Chowder

Eckrich* sausage is a staple in this house.  It initially started with their kielbasa, but at this point, whenever it's on sale, I grab multiples of all the varieties and throw them in the freezer until I want to use them.  I live with a German, sausage is NEVER a bad idea, based on my experience.

Anyways, I ordered some in our Walmart* Grocery order, which meant that later, when I search for "sausage recipes", ads for Eckrich came up and I saw something about a sausage corn chowder recipe and I took the bait.  I'm not sorry.

Ingredients:

-Sausage.  Obviously, I prefer Eckrich because it doesn't have a tough casing on the outside and it tastes delicious.  You can probably also use crumbly sausage, but it would need to be cooked first and I hate having to cook shit before I put it in the crockpot.

-Potatoes

-1 can of corn

-1 can of creamed corn

(you could also use 2 cans of creamed corn or 2 cans of plain corn, I'm all about flexibility)

-(optional) 1 can of beans (I used Navy beans because they were on hand)

-1ish cup of heavy cream/1 can of evaporated milk

-Broth (your flavor of choice)/substitute

-Corn starch

Side ingredients:
-1 box of Jiffy* corn muffin mix + required ingredients.

Directions:

-Dice sausage.  I usually halve along the length of the entire sausage, then cut along the sausage to make half moon shapes.
-Clean and peel potatoes.  I don't actually fully peel my potatoes.  I kinda cut off at least half of the peel, then just dice the potatoes with some peel on, because we like it that way.
-Add sausage, potatoes, and cans (with the liquid) into the crockpot.
-Mix together broth/substitute with heavy cream and corn starch.  Once well combined, add to crockpot.
-Stir items in crockpot to mix well, then cover and cook on low for 8 hours (truthfully, this is the only setting I ever use to cook anything in my crockpot.  When I've tried to do anything on high for less time, it never worked out, so it's always low for 8 hours.  The most important item to be cooked in this recipe is the potatoes, so when you can stick a fork through the potatoes, the soup is ready to eat).

Cover and cook!

When you're about 30 minutes from eating time, make corn muffins via the instructions on the box.  I used almond milk because that's all we had on hand and all the tops broke off.  I mean, Starbucks sells just muffin tops, so I considered myself a winner that I had done this unintentionally.  So it's better to use fatty milk.. I probably could have used the heavy cream, but didn't know how it would work and wasn't feeling up for the challenge, so almond milk it was.

After the muffins are done cooking, serve soup with muffins!  I broke up my corn muffins and added them directly to my soup.  I was NOT disappointed.

Final product!

*I don't receive any compensation from these companies, but if they were interested, I totally am also.