She's been scarred, very recently, by hot soup.
It's terrible.
She may never be the same again.
And I will probably have to re-season her.
Oh I'm sorry, Regina is my Dutch oven.
So I'm making this potato soup last night. It was cold and rainy all day and I thought "This is the day to make baked potato soup!" And really it was. I'm heating up the milk/flour mixture, EXACTLY how the recipe tells me to, and as I'm stirring (occasionally, as told!) I realize there is a weird substance on the bottom of the pot. And basically it had burned onto the bottom. At this point, I seemed to remember, learning long ago, that milk based soups have a tendency to burn onto the bottom of the pot they're made in.
I became agitated and mad at the Taste of Home woman who contributed this to the magazine. Did not she think that someone like me, who has made soup but never a milk based one before, would need to know such things and how to prevent them??? I love my Taste of Home magazine, but the people are always like "Oh I make this every year and everyone RAAAAAVES about it." Or "My kids refuse to come home for Christmas unless I promise to make my world famous blah blah blah." And so on and so forth. You know?
(As a side note, I would like to say that I think anyone can make good food. Whenever I make something and people say how delicious it is, I usually respond by saying "It's a really good recipe." And when I say that, I mean that the recipe did what it was supposed to, and we made a good team. It's not a way of being annoyingly humble. Seriously, ANYONE can cook or make anything. Some recipes may require just a little bit more knowledge and practice than others, and it can be done if you have the patience and desire to learn the skill. I don't know why I felt compelled to write this aside...)
Anyways, the soup turned out really good. REALLY good. Everyone's RAAAAVING about it. And by everyone I mean Mike. Unfortunately, I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and got the majority of the burned soup out of Regina, but a brown-ness remains and I fear it shall remain forevermore (it feels totally smooth, like it has become part of her beautiful, white interior now...OY! THE PAIN!). And after all of the scrubbing I did, it should probably, definitely be re-seasoned.
Everytime I walk past her, sitting in my dish drainer, crying tears of drying water down her sides, I pat her backside and say "Poor Regina. Poor, poor Regina."
In other news, isn't the advent calendar, that my mom made, utterly wonderful?
For some reason, she thinks there's not a crafty bone in her body, but I think this begs to differ. Am I right?
I spent the better part of the first 2 years of my marriage looking for an acceptable advent calendar. One that met up to the standards of the one I grew up with (my mom made that one too, years ago-and I mean YEARS, Angie was a toddler-, with glue, and it's still in one piece). It was most difficult, until one day I was visiting mom in the middle of the summer and she said "I made this for fun and don't know what to do with it, do you want it??" And I said "Does the Pope live in Italy!?!?!" Which means yes. And I probably just said yes anyways.
So, it came to pass that it became mine.
Also, I had this dream last night, in which my mom called me. Here is the conversation we had, in my dream:
Mom: You left your kitchen scale here. I've been using it.
Me: No I didn't. I'm using mine right now.
Mom: Oh, this must be Darius' then.