A few days ago I decided to make taco soup for dinner.  I have a great recipe that comes from my husband’s family and is really easy.  Only four or five ingredients.  Best of all, I’d started bread in the breadmaker and it would be hot and ready to serve by the time the soup was done.

So I flipped open my recipe box to pull out the recipe–only to find it was missing.  No problem.  It’s really easy, right?  I could just make it from memory.

Except I couldn’t remember just what the ratio of beans to broth was, and it turned out we’d used the last of the salsa without my replacing it.  But that was okay, I make southwestern and texmex a lot, so I just threw in some spices.  I was also one can of Great White Northern beans short, but I substituted black beans instead, which the family always eats happily, so that was alright.

Somewhere in there I took a phone call, and maybe that’s why I forgot to add the chicken.  Or taste-test the soup before deciding it needed to be zippier.

When the bread was ready, so was the soup.  Or at least close enough as never mind.  I served it up and called the family.

But for some reason they weren’t impressed with my now-disintegrated beans and sear-your-tongue-off soup.  The kids filled up on fresh bread while pushing the soup around in their bowls and throwing me side-ways looks.

My husband and I tried to show fortitude and suffer on, but no one volunteered for seconds.

However, not being one to nonchalantly throw out a full pot of perfectly good soup–okay, make that almost edible soup–I came up with a plan to break it down and recycle it.  I used a colander to strain off the beans and save the broth in seperate containers.  The beans we used for quesadillas, which the kids love, and the broth went into the frying pan when I made up fajitas.  Both tasted great in their new-and-improved mediums, and no one was the wiser that they had once again been served a creative concoction a la Mom.

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