"SO tasty. Made this on Halloween so dinner would be ready for us when we got home before trick or treating. Will absolutely make this again and again. I used a few less dried chiles. I didn't have as many on hand as I thought and it was fine although maybe not as spicy as the recipe is supposed to be. I do think that, instead of softening the tort""

"I made this a few weeks ago with excellent results. A couple of things I did differently was substitute a poblano pepper for the green bell pepper and whole milk and half & half for the heavy cream (it always seems like eating a bowl of sauce to me if you use cream in soup). I also mistakenly used shrimp stock instead of chicken stock. Grabbed the wrong one from the fridge. What a happy accident. I'd recommend saving your shrimp shells and making a shrimp stock (shells, bay leaf, carrots, celery, onion, peppercorns) for the next time you make this chowder. It really had a nice seafood flavor. Also, we didn't have baby shrimp on hand so used large shrimp cut into pieces.

"A few years ago I branched away from our family's traditional southern cornbread dressing and tried this. It is now a MUST at Thanksgiving. At our meal this year, someone else offered to bring stuffing. Um, no. This is one thing I won't change. Not too difficult to make except for lots of chopping. But for Thanksgiving, I almost always chop everything for every recipe a day or two before so I can just grab and go. It can be difficult to find chestnuts in some areas. Some years my grocery has them with the baking goods, others with Asian foods (apparently they aren't aware that they are different from water chestnuts). I'd suggest looking early for them as I've found them sold out as well.