Death by Soup

Do you know what it's like to make twenty soups? Twenty pots of onions sautéed with garlic, or cooked with carrots and potatoes, or boiled in broth, or simmered in crockpots along side the haunch of some snarling beast, and all fricasseed in spiced liquid of some sort or other?

I must tell you that I have carpal tunnel now from chopping parsley and peeling root vegetables. I have repetitive motion wounds from stirring up cream sauce to add to chowders. I have hives from little puff-clouds of fine-ground spices, flour and salt bursting all over me and finding their tiny way through my clothes onto skin. And believe it or not, I might finally have o.d.'ed on bacon.

As for my family, they are so done with the whole soup-gig. My boys look at me after licking their bowls clean, and their faces fall as they ask, "You mean this is dinner?" Then they gaze around the kitchen as if expecting to see a London Broil hiding out behind the butter dish. "This is it? Just soup?"

And I jut my chin at them in defense because even though Oven Stew is not London Broil, it takes just as much time to prepare. More, in fact. And I say, trying to keep the edge out of my voice, "Well, there's bread. And you can have another bowl of the stew." And I give them a look that tells them exactly what will happen to their little hides if they say anything else.

My husband, wisely, says nothing as he smacks his lips, except, "Thank you for another great meal."

Well, I get it. I'm sick of soup myself, and I love the stuff. But this is what it takes to put out a cookbook. Wonder why it never occurred to me that if you want pictures of food in your cookbook you actually have to make it.

Ah well. On the up side, I've got freezer meals for half a year in my basement. I'm just hoping to earn enough money to pay for the ingredients I'm using to fill up all those ziplock freezer bags. Hopefully by the time we shoot the pictures everyone will be back in the mood for soup again. Because that's when we start thawing.