For the third time in a week I poured out a generous serving of “the dreaded healthy soup” into a saucepan, sighing heavily. Since it had been my idea to make the soup in the first place, my husband and son reasoned, it should be me who has to eat it. So every three weeks or so I dig down to the far reaches of the freezer and extract yet another mason jar of the stuff.

The ingredients cost about forty dollars and required a special shopping trip. There are people starving in India. I can’t just throw good food away. So I don a pair of old but very respectable (because who wants to wear them in public) pink gloves, and start moving away all the vegetables and bread and pork chops, until at last I come to the remaining six(oh how can there still be this many?) jars of soup.

Now if you were standing at my shoulder, you would scold me: “For heavens sake Sheila, those jars are only half full. How can it be such a chore to eat that small quantity? How can it possibly take you three meals to get through half of a half jar?”
But you wouldn’t know the history of the dreaded healthy soup. You wouldn’t know how the original recipe was meant as a detox for your system, how one of the main ingredients is some form of seaweed, and how my hand slipped when I was putting in the cayenne pepper. You wouldn’t know, and now we get down to the crunch . . . how the dreaded healthy soup tastes. All two enormous soup pots of it.

I got the biggest mason jars I could find, and a funnel and a ladle and I put the soup out of sight, out of mind, into the freezer where I could ignore it, at least for a while. I think I am on the fourth jar at this point. I am an experienced dreaded healthy soup connoisseur by now. On about the second jar I discovered that adding a half teaspoon of salt and a can of tomatoes rendered the soup edible. Then with the next jar, I did the same thing and also put in a cup of frozen corn.

At this point we are at a place where anything left in the fridge is fair game. Cheese improves the taste substantially. A cup of last night’s Spanish rice is good too. The rice was too bland anyway and if there’s anything the dreaded healthy soup is NOT, considering all that cayenne pepper, that would be bland!

Unfortunately, by adding more and more ingredients, the soup does not shrink with each use as you would expect. It grows. It’s sort of a “loaves and fishes” effect. When you have eaten some and go to pour whatever remains in the pot back into the mason jar, you are generally horrified to discover the jar is full once more.
So after three meals of soup in the past week, more remains in the fridge, though I am trying not to look at it. Trying not to remember it is there. Thank heavens this last time the cat helped me eat it. We always said she would eat anything. Now we know it is true.