It was just a craving. That’s my only excuse for making slow cooker soup on (a) one of the hottest days of the summer, and (2) a Saturday, when I don’t get up in time to get an early start on anything, much less something that takes seven hours. So there’s why I was eating bean and sausage soup (stoup, actually, because it’s more stew than soup in some ways) at 9:30 pm.

The craving didn’t actually happen today. It happened Wednesday, the day I did my grocery shopping for the week. Or maybe it was Tuesday night when I wrote out my shopping list. Suppose I hadn’t thought of it earlier in the week. Suppose I woke up this morning with a craving. Would I have made a special trip to the supermarket for the ingredients? I would not. I would have had leftover pasta arrabbiata for the third night in a row.

Ha! My spell check wants me to change “arrabbiata” to Arabic. Or rarebit. But I copied the spelling off the recipe, which came from Rachael’s magazine (as do most of the new things I try, unlike the old favorite I made today, which came from kind reader bg). Anyway, I trust Rachael’s spelling prowess when it comes to food related items.

It was good, too. But it was hard to wait until 9:30 pm to eat, so I ended up snacking one extra time during the day. It didn’t make me any less able to eat two big bowlfuls of stoup, though. I might pay the price tomorrow, but I have a whole day and a half before I have to present myself at the doctor’s office. And anyway, he’s only checking my blood pressure, so what does he care what I eat? He seems to have a one-track mind, in that he can only talk to me about one thing during each visit. I don’t know if it’s policy (because of the co-pay) or just a blind spot that he shares with every other doctor I’ve seen in the last ten years.