Sometimes fellow Women’s Fiction author and Christian PENner Kristen Stieffel is a little too organized~~~

I am a list-making and scheduling type, and the busier my schedule gets, the more I take time to list and schedule everything that needs doing. I am so fond of my to-do lists that if I do something that wasn’t on the list, I’ll go back and add it to the list just to give myself the satisfaction of crossing it off.

One thing I like to do on weekends is make a big pot of soup that will last for lunches all week long. Once, a few years ago, while I was on one of my health kicks, I took down my copy of Healthy Homestyle Cooking by Evelyn Tribole to pick out a recipe, and I settled on “Italian Bean and Pasta Soup.” I hadn’t made it before, but it sure sounded good. Onions, white beans, and tomatoes with tiny shell pasta. Yum.

So there on my Saturday list among grocery shopping and other things I had to do, I listed “make bean soup.”

It started well. Sautéing onions, no problem. Little extra garlic, fine. Simmer the beans 1 to 1 ½ hours or till tender. With you so far. I attended to a few other things on my list while the beans cooked.

Once the beans had reached tender perfection, I looked at the next step in the recipe. “Transfer about half off the bean mixture to a blender…process until smooth.” Okay, I can do that. I got out my mother-in-law’s old-school Osterizer—a hefty model circa 1960. I put the soup in.

I placed my hand on top of the blender lid—you have to hold it down, you know, so it doesn’t blow off—and hit the “stir” button.

You know how blenders have those holes in the lid with a little measuring jigger that fits in like a stopper? Well it turns out that when you puree simmering hot beans, the steam released shoots right up around the edge of that hole.

I screamed and snatched my hand back. The lid blew off. Spinning blades flung white bean soup all over the room. The cookbook, which lay open on the counter nearby, still bears the scars of the eruption.

After hastily shutting off the blender, I returned what was left of the bean puree to the soup pot and spent the next half an hour cleaning the kitchen. Turns out a lidless 1960 Osterizer has a range of about ten feet.

The soup turned out all right despite the disaster, and my hand wasn’t burned too bad. It still functioned well enough for me to pull out my damp, stained to-do list and write down, just to give myself the satisfaction of crossing it off, “spray kitchen with soup.”

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Kristen Stieffel is a writer and writing coach, helping writers polish and nonwriters write. She is a member of Christian Editor Network and the Editorial Freelancers Association. Her fantasy novel Alara’s Call is under contract with OakTara, along with three additional books in the Prophet’s Chronicle series.