"testing the smoke alarm"

It's an old story in our family. About twice a year or about as often as we're told we should test our smoke alarms, someone in our house would burn a pot of beans or something similar. Well, the alarms didn't go off but I did see smoke beginning to collect along our ceiling this afternoon. It wasn't hard to determine the source:

Yup, a big pot of 15 bean soup that Carolyn had purchased from the 99 cent store the day before. It had looked so good that we had dug through the freezer last night to find some Kielbasa (Italian sausage). Today I had carefully diced the meat into the beans, sstirred the pot, and left it on the lowest setting to steep for awhile. In the meantime, I began working on our computer file organization and email problems.

Severeal minutes later (you know how time flies when you're absorbed in something) I wondered how the beans were doing. Too late I discovered that the extra 2 cups of water I had put in had boiled away as well as the water that Carolyn had left.

My first response was to attempt a rescue effort. I dumped all the loose liquid and beans into another, clean pan. I then added a little water and broke up all the lumps and clumpss. I tasted the soup. It was actually quite tasty until I got a crunchy piece. It tasted like a piece of charcoal - pretty bitter. I'm not going to recommend charcoal. It didn't look that feasible to remove just the burnt pieces. So that rescue effort was abandoned.



My second response was to make split pea soup which Carolyn had also purchased at the 99 cent store. It turns out to be a pretty simple recipe: split peas, salt, celery, carots, water, and strips of bacon. They also recommended milk and onions but we decided the soup looked and tasted great as it was.

Beginning of split-pea soup

Final picture of split-pea soup