Rustic Cabbage, Potato and Bean Soup

We recently had our house painted (inside) and that was the beginning of the end.

First of all, when they took the TV off the wall, they yanked it off like it was a poster on a dorm room wall…and snapped the cables…that are threaded through the  wall…down to the basement…which is where the cable box is. But they assured me they would fix it.  Yeah. Right.

First they rehung it about four feet higher than where it had been.  Seriously, it was literally up against the ceiling. I’m not sure if we were meant to lie on the ground to watch it, or if they somehow thought that giants lived in the house.  I’d need wings to just get up there to clean it every week. Then, there was the whole cable saga. They went to the store and got cables that didn’t work. So they ordered cables from Amazon…that didn’t work. Then, they brought in another guy who was supposedly a tech wizard.  FYI, he wasn’t. He wasn’t even a tech apprentice wizard. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure he hadn’t even graduated from wizarding pre-school.

So I ended up calling the cable company to fix it.

Ever been without TV for three weeks? Ever lived with someone who cannot survive without TV for more than 30 minutes? It’s not pretty. I’m not sure who was more miserable; me, the TV obsessed person I live with or everyone else on the planet that had to listen to the saga of why we didn’t have  TV.  I think it got to the point where people would rather hide behind a batch of poison ivy than hear the story of the inept painter and the cable guy again.

So when the cable guy finally showed up, I could barely contain my glee. I felt like I had won the lottery, been elected President of the United States and had a lifetime supply of chocolate delivered to my house all on the same day. And then everything went south.

First, the new router I had ordered didn’t work with our system because it only had 4 connections instead of 5 (???) and the boxes I had ordered had never showed up. I explained that when I had called about the missing boxes, they assured me that the tech would have them with him.  He assured me that he didn’t.  Not only that, he had no idea why they would have told me that and the only way I could get the boxes was to re-order them, pick them up at one of the stores in 10 days, or maybe he could possibly go to the warehouse an hour away and get them and return…sometime in the next millennium.

So basically, no good options. And this is why people hate cable companies.

Finally though, all the stars lined up and the tech, boxes and router were all in the same place at the same time, which was either a good omen or a sign of the apocalypse . Three hours later, we had cable…sort of.  He put the new router alongside the old one, so now all of my devices defer to the new one which has a range of about 5 feet, which means I have to keep switching my wi-fi to the one that works. The new remote works, but only to turn the TV on and off and change the channel.  If we want sound, we have to use a second remote or get up and do it manually. Alternatively, neither remote works at all, so we reenact the scene from A Christmas Story where the father keeps trying to fix the furnace. We also have one TV in the house that only broadcasts now in black and white and another that doesn’t work at all because the guy didn’t bring enough boxes.

And that was just how the painters messed up our TVs.  Don’t even get me started on the lights…..

Ingredients:

• 2 cups carrots, sliced
• 3/4 cup thinly sliced celery
• 3 cups cubed (1/2″) white potato
• 1 small onion, diced (about 3/4 cup)
• 3 cups chopped cabbage
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 teaspoon dried rosemary
• 1 can canellini beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 bay leaf
• 32 oz (1 box) vegetable broth

Directions:

1. Saute the onions, celery and carrots for 5 minutes,  Add potato and cabbage and saute for 3 minutes.  Add garlic and spices, including salt, and saute 30 seconds.
2. Add broth and bay leaf, stir and bring to a boil.  Cover and turn heat down. Simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.
3. Add the beans, cover and simmer 15 minutes more.

Enjoy!