Last night I decided to make some dinner for J and me, because I was just getting to that stage of being sick where I still wasn't feeling that hot but was also getting bored. I decided to make soup, specifically Pasta Fagioli, which is this traditional Italian soup with pasta and beans and is one of the four or so things I can make pretty well without messing it up or stressing out. Plus, soup. I figured that would be good for me in my state. A cure in the form of food, I thought. This soup, it takes a long time. You sort of add things little by little, letting it simmer for a while. The recipe I use comes out of a cookbook compiled by Italian-American women, and always yields a ton, a whole, huge pot and we can eat leftovers for several days.

It was almost done, and of course it was after 9 pm, as J and I can't ever seem to get it together to eat dinner earlier than that, and I tasted the soup and decided it needed more salt, so I picked up this cylindrical container of sea salt we got at a gourmet store one time. I think we'd meant to give it to someone for Christmas or something because we don't normally go around buying gourmet salt for ourselves, but we've been using it, and the thing is the grains of this particular type of salt are kind of big, and tend to stick together, so you really have to shake the container to get anything out, and I don't know if it was maybe because I was sick and a little more easily frustrated than usual, but I couldn't get any salt out and began shaking really hard and before I knew it the plastic top had dislodged from the container and all the salt, all of it, had fallen into the pot.

At this point I started screaming "Oh no!" and J ran into the kitchen to see if maybe I'd hurt myself or fainted and I had to tell him that I'd shaken the salt container too hard and poured all the remaining salt into the pot and, of course, he started laughing, because I mean, I guess it was funny. It was, it was funny. I don't know if it was more or less funny than what we did next - J decided we could maybe resolve the issue with science, by draining all the broth and rinsing all the pasta and soaking it a little to remove the salt, and then trying to save it with tomato sauce. So we did all this and settled onto the couch and had each taken a few bites before we sort of put our bowls down and admitted, "It's still pretty salty, isn't it?"

So just so you know, just in case you ever accidentally stir your entire three-quarters full container of sea salt into your dinner, don't bother trying to save it, because we've tried and it doesn't exactly work. And since it was already so late and we were tired, we just sort of broke off a few pieces of some really good bread I'd bought to go with the soup, ate that, and then polished it off with some jelly beans left over from Easter. I've accepted at this point that we're never going to be culinary experts, exactly. But we know every restaurant in town.