No Point in Crying over Spilt Pea Soup

No Point in Crying over Spilt Pea Soup

This morning, still bleary-eyed with sleep and the zombie-ing effects of nighttime Zicam, I decided to make a vat of pea soup spiked with cayenne to combat my and Hubby’s cold. Pretty simple, right? Just dump the frozen peas into a pot, dice up a Vidalia onion, add a splash of milk, a glob of MSG-friendly bouillon, and let it simmer a while. Next, pour a cup of milk into a bowl and sprinkle in some flour; mix that ’til no lumps remain. All in all, not exactly giving Julia Child a run for six pounds of butter and her sautéing pan. But the next step, involving my Blend-Tech set on the hot chocolate cycle, is where everything suddenly became dangerous.

If you know me at all, you know adding an electronical device to the recipe was my second mistake (my first was attempting to cook before coffee). For whatever reason, I am a pre-Geico commercial cave[wo]man when it comes to electronics. I have killed a vacuum, laptop, car engine, an iPod, immersion blender, a dormitory washer, and more cell phones than I’m willing to confess without my lawyer present. Thus, no longer having an immersion blender (I used it twice before the thing took one whip at the cement-like mousse for my double layer torte and gave up the ghost), I had to be innovative. This is when I remembered my Blend-Tech: another wedding gift that, regardless of my abuse, kept churning back for more.

Carefully pouring the bubbling concoction of peas, onion, and broth into the blender, I wedged the lid on tightly, and fiddled with the cycles until it landed on the one for hot chocolate. Here, ladies and gentlemen, was my reasoning: Hot chocolate’s obviously hot; so, wouldn’t all those Blend-Tech technicians know how to deal with hot soup as well as hot liquid?

I soon found out.

Merrily humming as much as my stopped-up sinuses would let me, I punched the Start button with one hand while pressing down on the lid with the other. But, as soon as I did, the contents inside the Blend-Tech began roiling. Steam hissed from the teeny-tiny hole in the lid as the pressure inside the container mounted. Now, I knew I was in a quandary (this coming from the girl who once said, “I’m not the sharpest Crayon in the box”). If I removed one hand from the lid to push the Stop button, the lid would surely take off flying faster than a Cessna. If I kept both hands on the lid, the pressure would get to the point where the contents would explode.

Oh, what to do? What to DO!

Well, as if the Blend-Tech could read my mind it promptly answered my question, and that was to grab a pressure washer and/or shop-vac, A.S.A.P. For, right then, as I wrestled the Blend-Tech with all the strength my cold hadn’t zapped, the steam spouting from the hole scalded my hand, and my hand involuntarily jerked off the lid. And, as I’d deduced, the lid went flying past my head as if trying to shatter a sound barrier. Immediately, the soup shot out of the Blend-Tech like a puke-green geyser–splattering my cookbook, my pristine cupboards, the walls, my counter top. Seriously. My kitchen looked like it had just gotten into a hissy fit with Emily Rose and lost.

Of course, at this moment my equally sick Hubby chose to come stumbling into the kitchen. His eyes took on a glazed look as they regarded his young, sniffling wife wallowing in a sea of soup. “Honey! Are you okay?” he hoarsely whispered, as if he might need to wade over to me and check for mental or bodily injuries.

Glancing around at my swamp of a kitchen, I bit my lip and nodded (which made my sinus headache throb even more); but I did not shed one tear, for I knew there was no point in crying over spilt pea soup.

Julia Child’s opinion on cooking that I live (and others die) by: “No excuses, no apologies, no explanations!”