Sunday Cookbook Adventures: My New Favorite Way to Eat Corn

Fiddling around with the search function over at the fantastic Eat Your Books site, I stumbled upon what sounded like a great recipe for one of my very favorite ingredients in what is one of my very favorite cookbooks: Roasted Sweet Summer Corn with Miso Butter, Bacon & Roasted Onions from the Momofuku Cookbook...
This is one of those recipes that is incredibly quick and easy... once you spend 12 hours making Ramen Broth and an hour or two caramelizing - Oh! Sorry, David Chang: "roasting" - onions... If I'd read the recipe for "roasted" onions in advance, I would have just taken some out of my frozen stash of caramelized onions (which Thomas Keller had me reserve for another use a while back). Sadly, it wasn't until I'd bought a pile of onions and started to prep that I realized what David Chang calls "roasted" onions are what the rest of the world calls caramelized onions... Anyway... I guess that saves the trouble of explaining this step. At least Chang's caramelized onions take 6 hours less time to make than Keller's...
OK. That's done... and all so we can get a heaping 1/4 cup to use in the recipe... At least caramelized onions freeze well and are one of my favorite foods.
The final component to prep is the Miso Butter. Approximately equal parts of white miso and (Amish) butter are combined until well-mixed...
That's it. When dinner time rolled around, with about 14 hours of prep behind me, this was only about a 20-minute dish to make. The first step here is to remove the kernels from several ears of corn. At this point I will confess to my dirty little secret: I really dig the little neon-green-with-bright-yellow-ear-of-corn-on-it corn-kernel-removing doohickey.
I got mine at one of those bargain basement stores for like $5 and fell in love... Sure, you can use a knife, but the doohickey allows you to strip the kernels over a bowl and have them all fall straight down instead of spraying everywhere. It's a cheesy, single-use kitchen gadget, but it's one that I'm glad to own... Anyway... Corn:
You need about four cups of kernels, which I measured in the way that I measure ingredients that I like... (Emmo's Rule for Casual Recipes: If you like the ingredient, assume all measurements are meant to be "a heaping (insert unit of measurement here)." If you don't like the ingredient, use barely the amount that's called for the first time you make the dish.)
That's it. Time to throw all of this good stuff in a hot pan...
Things start by browning some (Blood Farm) bacon...
All but a tablespoon of fat is drained off, then the corn is added and cooked over high heat until bright and just starting to brown in spots...
The caramelized, er, "roasted" onions and the bacon are added to the pan...
Things are stirred to combine...
The Ramen Broth and miso butter are added and cooked while stirring/tossing everything together until they just coat the corn and no liquid remains in the bottom of the pan...
Top with some sliced raw scallions, and you have yourself the perfect summer side dish...
Everything here works perfectly together. The corn is the dominant flavor, with a hint of bacon, nice complex saltiness from the miso butter, and a bright, fresh bite from the raw scallions. I could seriously eat this every single day and never get tired of it. I served it up with a grilled chicken breast (feeling the need for something healthier after last weekend's Thomas Keller-inspired butter- and cream-fest), but you could easily dress this up with a "fancier" protein and impress your friends. Love it. The Momofuku cookbook has yet to let me down, and this dish is entering the regular repertoire of quick and easy (once you have Ramen Broth and caramelized onions) summer favorites... Thanks, David Chang!

NOTE: In theory, I suppose, people who aren't me would tell you that you could make this dish with frozen corn... (Ew!) The fantastic blogger over at MomofukuFor2 did, and she enjoyed it... although she doesn't have an attitude problem about frozen corn the way I do. I would just plead with you to at least try this with real (where "real" means "fresh") corn first if you're going to try it, because (as I have noted before) frozen corn sucks. Seriously. If you can't get your hands on fresh corn because it's not in season, then you shouldn't be cooking dishes that call for corn as a primary ingredient. (I would argue that you shouldn't be using corn at all out of season, but I tend to have overly strong opinions on these kinds of things...) Part of what rocks about this dish is that fresh, bright crunch that only straight-off-the-cob corn can give you. Don't miss out on that...