Why You Should Always Have a Snickers on Hand

I know what you're thinking: "Another blog post about soup?!" but wait. Hear me out.

Tonight I tried to cook soup.

The night began with me, being lazy, and not having any bottled water around (which, unfortunately prevents me from doing most of the cooking I'm capable of). So, after some arguments with my stomach I finally forced myself to walk the ten minutes down the road to go to the store. I had been wanting to make a soup for awhile, I figured it was easy, and should be tasty.

I got some onions, got some rice (cuz rice goes in everything, duh), some grain that I have no clue what it is, and then made my way home to get started. 

It all started so well.

I put in the bouillon. 

Bouillon water!

I chopped onions while the water boiled.

I pre-soaked my rice and other mysterious grain. (fatal mistake #1?)

Soaking rice and mystery grain!

I even caramelized my onions, because someone said that was a good idea.

Onions caramelizing on an open range.

That's when I made my next fatal mistake. I decided to put all of the rice and mysterious grain into the pot of boiling water. That is to say. I put the rice, rice water, mysterious grain, and mysterious grain water all in the pot. 

So then I saw this bag of almost-finished half shell pastas and thought: "ehhh, why not?!" (#3)

That damn bag of pasta!

Do you know what happened next? My soup got that weird slime on the side and I knew it was going to go downhill. The color of the soup also went from a nice dark brown to a dirty-water color. I panicked. I threw in spices because that's all I could think to do (#4)!

"All the spices!"

I finally calmed myself down, let the soup finish its boiling time and let it simmer for the next hour. In the back of my mind I knew what was going to happen when it came time to eat this soup, but I nonetheless stirred every five minutes and resisted the urges to add more spices.

And then, and then slowly the soup went from soup to stew. And then slowly it went from stew to a gumbo-like consistency. And that's when I panicked again and added even more water (#5?). Then, then I continued to stir every five minutes.

Hesitantly, as the hour of simmering came to an end, I took the lid off so I could face my creation.

I gulped.

I've been told that you are supposed to finish a soup with vinegar.

So in my crazy, panicky, hungry state, I reached down and grabbed the vinegar.

And boy did I finish that soup with vinegar (#6?).

Sluggishly I reached for the bowl. I knew what was about to happen. My taste buds were scared but my stomach was roaring. I poured some soup/stew/gumbo into the bowl.

Eek.

I reached for the spoon. I took a bite.

Pure salt. Pure, starchy salt. 

Don't forget the still kind-of-crunchy rice. 

Yuck.

I don't even want to think about the cleanup that's about to be involved with this.

And that, my friends, is why you should always have a snickers on hand: emergency dinner. 

Dinner!