Why Does My Cereal Look Like Mulch?

So if you read my last post, you saw this inspiration of mine to make a nice, warm, homey dinner - tortellini soup and foccacia. Well, the foccacia turned out really well. The soup? In the trash. Let me explain.

Both recipes call for fresh rosemary. Of which, I happily have a nice pot of in my patio room. I just wander out there when I need a sprig of it and throw it right into my recipes at will. I usually give it a good rinse, but call my crazy - after all the stomach illnesses, I decided to really wash it good this time. So I got a bowl, filled it with water, threw in the half-dozen sprigs I picked and gave them a good swish and rinse. Tore the leaves off two stems and threw in another whole stem and let the whole mess simmer for a few hours. I was getting ready to put the tortellini in the pot, and getting ready to shape the foccacia for baking when I noticed something....horrifying. Bugs in the bowl. In the bowl of water where the rosemary for the foccacia was sitting. Lots of bugs, tiny, tiny little bugs. Then I looked at the pot of soup. Oh, gross.

Now, I'm SURE those bugs were, by this time, cooked down to nothing. And I'm pretty sure that we've eaten them by the hundreds since, well, I've had that plant for two years now. But I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't bring myself to eat soup that I knew had cooked bugs in it. I'd be looking at every spoonful.

Dinner wasn't a complete disaster. I still had the tortellini, and I pulled out a jar of spaghetti sauce that I keep on hand for an occasion such as this. And the foccacia was okay, because I hadn't yet added the rosemary to that, so I made sure it was bug-free.

Yuck. I'll be more careful from now on! But for a few days after, and even still, I can't help but overly-inspect everything I stick in my mouth. And I happen to notice that my cereal, while certainly bug-free, looks curiously like what we spread in the garden in springtime. Kinda tastes like it too! What we don't do in the name of colonic health, huh?