soup tragedy

I am in the middle of making a GINORMOUS pot of homemade vegetable soup for my Mom’s birthday lunch tomorrow (three weeks late, but hey – better late than never). This has become a traditional meal for her birthday, because she always makes everyone’s favorite meal for their birthday, and her favorite meal is vegetable soup, which she hardly ever makes because she’s always trying to make things that everyone else really likes. Anyway, making soup today brings back vivid memories of last year.
Ali was just barely one month old, and so I was going to attempt to make my first whole family meal. We were still very much in the “baby cave” – I know that all of you recent parents out there can remember all too well how draining it is to have a one month old.
Anyway, I had two huge pots of soup that had been cooking for hours (this year I traded in the two huge pots for one ginormous pot), and I was working on my White Chocolate Cheesecake dessert. I had just made and baked the crust for the cheesecake and left it on the stove to cool while I mixed up the filling. I had my back to the stove, and all of a sudden there was a HUGE explosion. I had no idea what it was. I turned around, and the Pyrex baking dish with the crust in it had exploded. I mean, into a million pieces that were projected all over the kitchen. Now let me say first that it was SUCH a blessing that Ali and Chris weren’t in the room, and that I was on the other side of the kitchen from the stove. But besides that, it was as bad as it could get.
The explosion was my fault – I didn’t realize it, but I had turned on the wrong eye of the stove, so the eye that I set the dish on was on low, which resulted in said explosion. I didn’t have lids on my two huge pots of soup, so after I gathered myself as much as I could (ok – I was still panicking), I started searching around in my soup. The first thing I pull out is a huge glass shard. So now I’m in full panic mode. Here’s this soup with all these ingredients that I have been working on for at least 3 hours, and its 9pm at night and I am in total denial that I’m going to have to start all over. I break down in tears, and my AMAZING husband takes over the situation. He goes into the kitchen and cleans up all of the glass while I try to sort out in my head what happens next. I am trying to convince him that surely the glass is just on the top of the soup and not all the way down. Wisely, he doesn’t argue with me, but just stays silent, and lets me come to the conclusion for myself that there is no way that the soup is salvageable. Meanwhile, Ali is screaming in her pack and play.
So I gather myself, and Chris told me that he would handle the cleanup and the baby if I wanted to go to the store to re-buy my ingredients (and a new Pyrex dish). Being the accountant that I am, I cannot stomach the possibility that I just wasted all of that family money, and insist on paying for the new ingredients out of my spending money. Chris tried to convince me that it was ok, to use the family money, but I was still in panic mode, trying to figure out every way that I can possibly right my wrong. While I was at the store, Chris dumped both of the huge pots of (now glass-ridden) soup off of our back deck into the woods. So there may have been a lot of squirrels and other woodland creatures that had to go to the ER with cuts in their stomach that night. :( Oops. I hope PETA doesn’t ever read this blog.
So when I got home, we exhaustingly got Ali to bed, and then I began all over again. Being that she was of course still waking up two or three times every night, the next day was pretty rough.
But, as tragic as it was at the time, I will never forget that explosion. And really, it is kind of humorous to look back on it now. I will also never let my MOM forget how much I loved her that day to make FOUR huge pots of soup and TWO cheesecakes for her. :)
Luckily, tonight’s soup seems to be going much easier, and since Ali let us sleep VERY late this morning, I have all the energy in the world. If only I could go back to 2007 Rachel and let her borrow some.