ham soup

I'm venturing away from the general format of this blog (meaning place to post pictures) and doing some actual blogging. Joe's away for the week and I've already called all the people I feel comfortable calling when I have nothing in particular to say. Several times. So now I'm posting this.

I attempted to make ham and bean soup tonight. Joe's mom made it one Christmas and much to my surprise (ham and bean soup would certainly have been something I actively avoided in my childhood), I really liked it. Maybe because it was light and salty after a week of rich and sugary. Anyway, I asked for the recipe and tonight I finally decided to try it.

First of all, it made like ten gallons, and as I have already mentioned, it is just me here for the week. As much as I liked Linda's version of the soup, ten gallons is a bit much. Second of all, when I went to read the recipe, it said nothing about adding liquid. I'm not much a cook, but I know you can't put a lump of meat, carrots, potatoes, and 2 cans of beans into a pot and expect soup. However, I think I went a little crazy on the liquid. Because I ended up with a vat of slightly golden, fairly salty liquid, some meat chunks, and some bean mush. How does one mess up a soup recipe that simply involves placing items in a pot? Thank goodness for Pillsbury breadsticks in a can, because that's what I had to rely on to fill me up. Dunked in generous amounts of slightly golden liquid, of course.

And while I'm on the topic of cooking in general, I was on the Betty Crocker website looking for a bachelor's cookbook for a gift, and when I realized they didn't make one, I ended up sending a suggestion to General Mills telling them they were missing a great marketing opportunity. As I was getting ready to hit "Send" on my suggestion, I read the small print about their rights to the intellectual property of my comment. “Without limitation, General Mills shall exclusively own all now known or hereafter existing rights to the suggestions of every kind and nature throughout the Universe and shall be entitled to unrestricted use of the comments for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise without compensation to the provider of the suggestions.”

I recommended to my boss that we copy General Mills's language. We would hate to be the victims of some infringing aliens and have no recourse to collect on our intellectual property. I particularly like how Universe is capitalized, just so we can be clear that we mean our Universe in particular, and not some universe in general.