Bean Soup

Hi All!

First of all, let me say to the foodies out there - don't get excited! I am not going to show you pictures or give you a recipe. I am just talking about my recent experience with bean soup and it isn't really pretty!

About two weeks ago I was perusing the grocery aisles and decided that I was in the mood for some bean soup. There were all kinds of packages of bean soup beans all nice and prepacked for me to choose from. I took my time and read instructions on several bags until I found what I thought was the "right" one. This bag of bean soup included flavoring and said no ham bone was needed. Perfect!

The bag o' beans sat in my pantry for about two weeks as I waited for the right time to make bean soup. This isn't as easy as you might think. I have to have time to pamper the soup (and to pre-soak the beans!) and it has to be when I can eat the soup since Hubby will not touch "homemade" soup with a twenty-five foot spoon! So - I waited.

Finally, Sunday seemed like the perfect time for the soup. I could eat the soup for lunch this week and I wasn't going anywhere all day so I could work with the soup. Great!

I did the "fast" pre-soak of the beans which involved boiling and letting them sit for over an hour. Then I started my soup. I did everything according to the directions. The soup. It turned out . . . . bland. To say the least!

It just was missing something - probably that "non-needed" ham bone!

Well, I put the pot of soup into the fridge and told myself I would mess with it on Monday night after work. Did I do that? No! I waited until last night when I was tired and a little cranky!

I decided to blend the beans to thicken the soup. After that I added all kinds of spices - pretty much anything I found in the spice drawer and thought might go well with beans. Dried onion flakes went in (I don't have regular onions because Hubby is very, very anti-onion! I can sneak the flakes into things!). I stirred and stirred. Then I decided to reduce the soup a bit so it wasn't so thin.

That, my friends, is where I got into trouble!

The actual reduction process went well. The soup thickened up nicely. It was when I took the ladle to stir the concoction that everything went to . . .well, heck!

I stirred and had a ladle full of soup when the soup, now nice and thick, decided to "spit" at me. A HUGE glob of soup flew out of the pot and landed right on my thumb. Of the hand which held the ladle full of soup!

Needless to say, the glob of burning hot soup startled me a bit. It startled me so much, in fact, that I jumped and promptly dropped the ladle - full of soup.

The ladle full of soup landed on the kitchen rug - AFTER landing on my bare foot. Now I had burning hot soup on my thumb AND all over my bare foot! Yikes!

I quickly wiped the soup off and ran my hand under cold water. My foot - well, it didn't reach up into the sink to get the cold water treatment! After getting the "souped" rug into the washer I iced both affected parts of my body but . . . OUCH!

I am beginning to think something somewhere is trying to tell me to not make soup! It seems like every time I make home made soup, I end up burning myself! What do you think?

By the way - the hand and foot are MUCH better this morning.

Trisha

Voice Update: Well, as I was sitting in traffic on the Tollway for OVER AN HOUR last night on my way home from work, I got in some quality massage time. My voice is still hanging in there. Go, voice, go!

P.S. Blogger is still correcting the spelling on correctly spelled words! It just told me I didn't know how to spell instructions! The nerve!