the recipe

So I have this recipe. It's a recipe for soup. I have been working to perfect it most of my life. The catch is that I am making it from scratch and writing it down as I go. When one thing works, it makes it onto that little 4x6 index card; when something else doesn't work, it's back to the drawing board.

I naturally had to start with a base for the soup. I started with water, then I added a little butter. This seemed to be a good start but I needed to add some stuff that would make it heartier. So I added potatoes, and then decided that lentils would be good as well. I tasted it, and it was good, but it still needed more. I decided to add a rutabaga. When I tasted the soup with that addition, I promptly spit it out. Needless to say all the rutabaga chunks ended up in the garbage, not my soup.

After the rutabaga incident, I proceeded to add some stewed tomatoes. This definitely improved my soup, but I needed to add some stock veggies. I diced up some celery and threw that in. One by one more ingredients were being added to my soup and my index card. But when I looked at my soup, I noticed that it lacked color. So I went to the fridge and pulled out some green peppers and carrots and put them in. "Perfect," I thought, "my soup is now complete." But when I tasted it, it seemed rather bland. "Of course!" I exclaimed. "I forgot to add some spices to my soup!" I went to the spice rack and added some salt, sage, and bay leaves. I let that simmer awhile to let the spices blend in before I tasted it.

When I tasted it for what I thought was the final time, I realized that I had left out one of the most essential ingredients for cooking--onion. But here is where the problem begins. Although I love onions, I am terrified of them. You see, the first time I ever tried to cut an onion to put in my soup, the knife slipped and went deep into my hand. Not only was I cut, but the juice from what little bit of onion I did peel seeped into my cut and made it burn even worse. I still have the scars to prove it. Every single time I have tried to peel or cut an onion since then, the knife has slipped and I have cut myself over and over again, making me more and more afraid to even touch an onion, much less try to chop it.

But I can't stop trying. I love the taste of onions in my soup, especially when they get really transparent and thin. It adds so much flavor. But at this point I'm so scared to try putting an onion in my soup. They just end up burning me. Maybe I will just forget it. After all, I have all those other ingredients, and I'm running out of room on my index card.