That bastard! How could he do this to me?

For the past week I’ve been on a sacred quest, a quest for French onion soup. I wanted it to be the best I ever had, and that’s saying something, as superb French onion soup is more like an orgasm than anything foodlike.

So I went online and tracked down what looked like really good recipes for the soup and homemade beef stock. Purchased a big pot and a strainer for the stock. Spent about thirty bucks on the ingredients, including soup bones that were way more meat than bone, since the butcher part of King Stoopids was closed, and for the spices, since I had few to begin with. A bay leaf has never before graced my digs with its aromatic leafy self. Monday I made the stock, simmering it for 7 hours.

Before I go on: (I never do this, or maybe only something like this every five years, when I get a real strong hankerin’.)

Yesterday I was starting in on the soup when I realized I didn’t have my dry white wine for the recipe. Never have wine around here since my body disallows ethanol in quantity, thank goodness. Plus it tastes too much like grapes.

So I dashed a block to the liquor store and picked a cheap white wine, asking the guy if it was dry, and telling him I needed a dry white wine for my soup. He nodded smiling in agreement at what I had picked, and motioned generously toward it with both arms. “Dly? Belly good, belly good!”

Figuring the least a liquor story guy would know is whether a wine is dry or not, regardless of how secondarily he spoke English, I grabbed my bottle of Cabin Sabernog and went on my boneheaded way.

I even tasted it, for pete’s sake, before adding it to the soup. Struck me as a little sweetish for a dry wine, but what did I know?

Anyway, the soup sucks. Well, it doesn’t suck but it sure doesn’t taste like French onion soup, with that half-cup of sweetish wine simmered in. It’s actually okay, as long as you don’t hope to experience French onion flavor when you eat it. After all those hours of work, the worst and most painful crying I’ve ever experienced with onions, six tons of hope, and over fifty bucks.

That guy made my soup okay. O the despicable dog! (insert extended nattering in my head about how I would masterfully upbraid him here)

Okay that’s the blame part.

Now we move on to the sanity section.

I am such an a-hole. How could I do that? One moment to take thought, and the soup would have been fine. I do at least know that really dry wine puckers your rectum. In fact a secretive part of me even knew that it wasn’t dry wine as soon as I tasted it, but I was in such an all-fired hurry, and indeed was apparently almost looking for someone to blame for my soup failure, since blaming someone is so much more enjoyable than soup, especially when they don’t speak English very well.

End Blame Part B

Blame of any kind, whether of others or oneself, is a poor exercise in judgement. Emotional blame, I mean. Blame is about as smart as a dog turd. All it does is make somebody feel like one.

The answer is attention. Instead of blaming, pay attention.

Pay attention!

LWIII