Do They Take Duos on Worst Cooks in America?

What a blustery cold day we had here!

I threw together a pot of vegetable beef soup to simmer for supper. Hick came in ten minutes after I added the last ingredient, and said, "That stew is ready now, right? So I can have some for lunch?" It might as well be stew. Hick does not like the "juice" in soup. That's why he builds a bowl like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I told him it was done enough. But that we were having it for supper, and also tomorrow. He ate it anyway.

What Hick does not seem to understand is that even though all the ingredients are in the pot, the final taste is still percolating. The flavors have to marry. There'll be no common-law soup in MY house! No shacking up. No living in sin. Nobody's getting the milk for free.

Genius came home from a sleepover as I was putting the soup together, and stepped right into a nightmare.  

"Hey, open those cans of vegetables for me. The can opener makes my wrist hurt."

"You know how awkward this is for me, right? Why don't we have a left-handed can opener? Or one of those mechanical ones?"

"Why don't we have a dishwasher instead of my hands? If that's too hard for you, I can do it myself. You can go take your shirts out of the washer and hang them."

"No, this is fine. You can do the shirts."

"I'm busy cooking this hamburger right now. Hey! That part looks funny. I'm taking it out. It might be horse meat. Do you want to do it?"

"No. I'm fine."

"You didn't take out the trash last night like I told you, so you'll have to do it now. And you didn't fill the pepper and salt grinders like I told you last week."

"I can only do one thing at a time!"

"And not very well. How am I supposed to get these carrots out? You didn't open all the way around the lid. It won't come off."

"Give it back!"

"Things take so long when I have help."

"Where's the peppercorns? Oh, here they are. I guess you know that I have touched every single one of them with my fingers. My skin cells will be in the soup."

"Don't worry. They will blend with that tip of my thumb I cut off while dicing the onion. Grind some pepper into the soup."

"What? There. Is that enough?"

"Well, that's about the amount one person would use for a single bowl of soup, and not a whole pot. But don't worry about it. It's fine."

"Yay! I made soup!"

I find kitchen chores to be SO exhausting.