Preparation Soup

I am not a preparation person. For example, it does not occur to me when starting out on a dinner soup making expedition to check that I have my "zz zz" machine before I start (you know the kitchen appliance I'm talking about right? It's called a stick mixer I think...or something like that. It's tall and skinny and goes "zz zz" when you press the button). Nor does it occur to me that perhaps trusting the website which made roasting and peeling capsicums sound like something anyone who knows how to boil an egg could do with their eyes closed was not such a good idea. Roast, cool and peel. Now I'm sure that to many people, it is a simple task. And perhaps with a little more reading and preparation I could have avoided the disaster which left me peeling sticky, red, paper thin skin in various shapes and sizes off the darn things for 20 minutes with a toddler alternating the activities of sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor crying and clinging to my legs whimpering. And so you might be able to empathize with my frustration when, after close to 2 hours of washing and chopping and roasting and boiling and stirring and (grrr) peeling, it finally pops into that thing I loosely refer to as my brain that I took my "zz zz" machine to work and never did bring it back home.

And so there I stand, in a kitchen decorated with dry, curled up pieces of capsicum skin, watching a pot of very homemade roast pumpkin, garlic and capsicum simmer away with no way of making it into soup. And since the little person has now stopped alternating and chosen to stick with clinging to my legs, I'm forced to stand on the spot watching the clock creep past 6:45 and drink in the fullness of my lack of preparation, which has now resulted in a lack of dinner.

To make matters ever so slightly worse, I now have to share the oh so lovely news of my self inflicted disaster with my oh so patient husband, who has not only worked a 10 hour day at the cafe, but has already come home once, collected an assortment of very manly tools and returned to the cafe to fix the toilet door which apparently is about to fall off at any moment, and only in the last 20 minutes or so has finally been able to sit down and relax. He, constantly surprising me with his lack of surprise at times such as this, agrees to go back to the cafe (for the third time) and collect my "zz zz" machine so that we can in fact eat dinner at some point. And I am left to ponder the preposterous nature of my latest disaster.

Thankfully, the soup, when it was finally served to a tired man and his wife at the coffee table of a rather messy lounge room, after two children had been fed left over ham and cheese and sent to bed, was in fact delicious and very close to being worth the thought, time, effort and resulting disaster. And I am once again reminded that my disasters become increasingly insignificant with the addition of a little delicious-soup perspective.

Decision: Preparation decreases chance of disaster. Must work on that.