I have this thing with cooking…I’m really not good at it. I’m sort of terrified of cooking, and based on tonight’s experience, I have a good reason to be! I had three instances of near death experiences while in the kitchen today.

My husband normally does the cooking in this house, and I do all the baking. Poor hubby has the flu. He hardly ever gets sick, and when he does, he gets over it within 48 hours. This time around he ended up with the flu, and I happened to be playing in an orchestra gig during the peak of it. I felt really bad that I was out of town while he was suffering, so when I got back today I decided to make him some hearty chicken soup.

This wasn’t just any chicken soup, mind you — this was super healthy soup. Like kick your germs in the face by eating kale smoothies with garlic kind of healthy. I loosely based my soup off this excellent recipe, and it turned out great, even though I was distracted by watching Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

1) Boiling potatoes 
Let me first admit that I am ridiculous for not knowing how to soften potatoes. Go ahead, get that laugh out of your system. If only I had listened to Samwise Gamgee’s wise advice (“Boil ’em, Mash ’em, Stick ’em in a stew”), I could have saved myself the extra five minutes whilst I searched the interwebz.

I boiled my potatoes and tested their squishiness by dipping my ladle into the water. I’m still not sure how this happened, but I ended up somehow causing a large splash of water to jump ship out of the pot and onto my stomach. Like, what the heck?! I cried like a little girl for about a minute, and I’m not proud of it, but I now have a beautiful red welt on my tummy to remind me how NOT to boil potatoes.

2) Knife slice
At one point I was chopping vegetables and I dropped my wonderfully sharp Henckel’s knife on the floor. I could hear my mothers voice as it fell to the floor, “My Henckel’s knives are wonderful. I received them as a wedding gift, but they’re such good quality they outlasted my marriage.”

The knife narrowly missed my foot. My husband later told me that he is required to wear close-toed shoes in lab at med school and suggested I wear close-toed shoes in the kitchen. I told him it would break all the assumptions people have about our relationship. How am I supposed to be the typical barefoot and pregnant wife if I am both shoe-laden and baking only literal buns in a literal oven?

3) Cooler take-down
I dropped some potato bits on the floor and leaned over to pick them up only to trip over my cooler and fall onto the floor. The problem with this (outside of my clumsiness), is that I was holding said sharp Henckel’s knife in my hand, and nearly stabbed my face in the process. I was very annoyed, so I let out an angry Amazon warrior woman cry and kicked my cooler. If the cooler brought me down, I was going to bring that cooler down! Yea, I have anger problems in the kitchen. It’s called being Italian.

Hopefully I won’t catch the flu from my husband, but at the very least I have some hearty delicious soup to keep my tummy happy and my immune system strong. And next time I cook, I might wear shoes…and a hazmat suit.