In the best of circumstances, I am something of a suspect chef. For instance, I make great breakfast burritos, but I'm not exactly sure how to boil an egg. I'm not good at frying things, but I'm an idiot savant at making sauces. My chicken dumpling soup is the stuff of legend and I can make home made noodles, but I am seemingly incapable of following simple recipes at other times. Hence, it was no surprise that my first foray into vegetarian cooking was to haute meatless cuisine as Little Big Horn was to successful cavalry engagements.

It all started with a magazine called "Food and Wine". This is a magazine you sometimes see in a doctor's office waiting room or in the lobby of a Lexus dealership. It's a magazine targeted at a reader making six figures or more. I know what you're saying; "Why the heck are you getting it?" I had no choice. A certain newspaper (which shall remain nameless) has, for the last several years, been offering a magazine subscription at no extra cost with a paid newspaper subscription. Never mind that the paper's subscription rate goes up ten dollars a year, I need another magazine subscription like I need a third elbow, and my other choices were "Competitive Needlepoint" and "Nudist Skydiving", and, viola, I am a proud subscriber to "Food and Wine."

While deeply in thought perusing a recent issue (okay, okay, while passing the time taking the Browns to the Super Bowl), I saw a recipe for barley, mushroom, and meatball soup. Being a self-ordained, or at least self-deluded, culinary genius, I decided I could retrofit this recipe to be vegetarian. "I know;" I thought, "I'll just drop the meatballs and use vegetable stock. Hey, we got that pantry full of beans I bought the other day. We ought to go ahead and toss some of those in there, too. Sure, I'll use the cranberry beans. I wonder if they taste like cranberries. Let's use really good mushrooms, too. I'll buy portabellas!"

At this point, I was getting rather full of myself. I had drooled about this recipe over the course of several sittings and thought, "Shoot, I've read this recipe so many times, I bet I don't even need to use the recipe (note: had someone taken this bet at three to one, it would have paid off rather nicely).

It should be noted at this juncture, that one bag and one cup, when it comes to beans and grains, are two radically different things. I had soaked the whole bag of beans the night before the fateful dinner to soften them up. That may have been the impetus for using the whole bag of barley. Add in the two whole diced portabella mushrooms, and this soup had the liquid retaining capabilities of Motley Crue on a weekend sleepover at the Viper Room.

I first cooked up the mushrooms and the barley. I wasn't able to add the beans yet, as they were still somewhat al dente. Already though, I discovered that I needed to add more liquid to my barley. I started cooking at around four in the afternoon. Every hour I checked the beans, and every time they were as firm as a post Viagra Bob Dole (I would imagine. I have no direct experience here). A pattern developed. Check the beans, add liquid to the soup. By five o'clock, the soup had sucked up so much moisture, the Colorado water table had dropped several inches. I was forced to switch to a bigger pan by about five thirty. At six o'clock, beans still firm, I added more broth to the soup. Also, fearing the flavor was being diluted, I added more spices. This pattern also continued. By six thirty, the soup had started sucking all the moisture from my body. Microscopic bacteria in my skin packed up like so many Dust Bowl Oklahomans and set off on a Steinbeckian voyage to moister climes and a better life elsewhere.

Judy had arrived home from work at this point, and we were already hatching the backup plan for ordering a pizza. At seven o'clock, New Orleans called and thanked me for single handedly reclaiming several thousand acres of land from the Gulf. Finally, at about eight, we were ready to eat; or rather the soup was ready to eat. We were actually ready to eat several hours earlier. The final recipe was as follows: Several gallons of broth, a volume of water roughly equivalent to the contents of Lake Superior, a bag of beans, a bag of barley, two portabella mushrooms, three cans of Emeril's essence, and four cups of frustration. Serve in a container roughly the size of a bathtub, garnish optional (note this recipe may only be reprinted with the express written consent of the author).

Judy and I cozied up to the table and took the plunge. The soup was to tastelessness as Paris Hilton is to...well...tastelessness. I emptied a whole pepper grinder into the bowl to no avail. Judy was kind, but I could tell she was less than satisfied. I had seen the look before. After supper, we loaded up six plastic containers of the leftover soup. To my credit, or at least my extreme stupidity, I was able to choke down two more servings of the brown tasteless mash over the next few days. After that I gave up, but I was able to sell the rest to Home Depot as wall paper paste.

The moral of this entry is twofold: Always follow direction no matter how good you think you are and never underestimate the flavoring power of pork.