Interlude: Losing a Battle and Winning the War

I'm not going to put you through multiple posts of this sad minestrone and my efforts to revive it. I already told you it was a terrible recipe and I wanted to try to fix it. The good news is what I did was an improvement. The bad news is, not enough.

So let's learn together, shall we?

After refrigeration the sad minestrone just became a lot of macaroni that had sucked up all the liquid, some undercooked veggies, and some beans. Solution number one: Attempt a better broth and warm some macaroni-and-veg-and-beans in it.

So I boiled some Better than Bouillon No Beef paste in some water with nutritional yeast. The broth itself was great! Then I added the sad soup solids, heated them in my lovely broth, and added a generous amount of shredded Violife Parmesan. I topped it off with Italian seasoning and garlic salt. I had a half of one of my cornbread muffins on the side with some margarine.

It was remarkably bad! The muffin was great, the broth was good, and the soup itself was...not good, somehow.

Okay, Plan B. I had only done that to one serving, after all. But what a savory broth can't fix, maybe, I figured, butter (Earth Balance, anyway) and cheese (Violife Parmesan) sauce might. I melted said butter and cheese into some soy milk and then heated the soup solids in that.

I topped that with a generous amount of Violife Parmesan and some freshly cracked black pepper. Again, a corn muffin made an appearance.

And it was bad. Again. Not horrible--still edible--but bland and unappealing. At this point I started to wonder if by going to the dentist (my one outside adventure) I'd caught coronavirus, lost my sense of smell, and thus was not liking any of my food, and had to remind myself that my other meals were fine. It was just the effort to revive this soup that was failing.

So I made a choice. I needed to prioritize myself. I never intended to make so much soup that I'd eat it for days on end anyway, and especially not when it verged on inedible. So I didn't face it a fourth time. I threw the last bit out, cut my losses, and faced the world anew the next day.

The lesson--after having a really good dinner after that choice, which you'll see soon--is that sometimes, you're not doing yourself any favors trying to rescue your failures. Sometimes, failure is just that--failure--and we can lose a battle and win anyway in the end. Life is so hard here sometimes, and I needed to be as kind to myself as I could given all the pressures and sadness. I made the right choice to throw out a bit of sad soup that was only getting worse all the time anyway. I probably should have realized that when I made a good broth but a terrible soup. There was not going to be any reviving this. And that's okay.