I was so good.  I planned and cooked lunch.  I planned and cooked dinner…and left it on the stove while I left everyone at home and “ran” to the store for some good bread.  But my run was more like running through January’s proverbial molasses…I’d forgotten it was rush hour.

So by the time I got home, dinner was…burned.  Irrevocably, irretrievably, irritatingly.

The deepest irony is that when I got the recipe off my blog for Andersen’s pea soup, I re-read my previous pea soup trials and laughed, and sighed, and said, “Nevermore.”

That’s what my cousin Lea calls a “mortal boast”.

I only made one batch today, not six.  And I was totally prepared not to forget to take out the bay leaf prior to blending.  And it was so easy.  It took ten minutes to throw together.

So when I arrived home to find the pot and all its contents boiled dry and a faint but growing stench of burnt green peas filing the house, I was disturbed.

Actually, I was filled with self-loathing.

I laid on the kitchen floor, the only logical thing to do when dinner goes up in smoke.  It doesn’t smell as bad down there.  Smoke rises, you know.

Lia and Amelie thought that was a wonderful idea and joined me.  Together we sniffed and snuffled…them from the acrid smell of burnt dinner, me from a disappointed craving mid-pregnancy.

I think the worst part is that after the next 12 hours of smelling burnt pea soup in my house, despite the open windows, I’m probably not going to want to eat pea soup again for a very long time.  And it sounded so good.

But maybe pea soup and I are not meant to be together.  Maybe I need to just accept this.

NO!  Third time’s the charm!

Or is it, third time a bridesmaid, never a bride?

And I don’t even have any chocolate-y mint-y grasshopper cookies to soothe my tortured palate.  <sigh>  What’s a girl to do?