The Cabbage Soup Experiment: Day One (Why I’ll Never Be a Food Blogger)

I started the cabbage soup diet this morning by grieving over what I was going to miss because of the cabbage soup diet: Halloween. Last night, I’d committed myself to starting this seven-day torture today—just four days before the biggest chocolate bonanza of the year. Could I be any stupider?

Moving on…

Since this was Day One of the diet, I was allowed to eat cabbage soup and fruit. That’s it. Soup and fruit. I raced off to the grocery store, dragged back the $46 worth of supplies needed to make a massive double batch of cabbage soup and dusted off a 12-quart stock pot.

Normally, I hand-chop veggies (when I use my food processor, the veggies end up looking like they were attacked by rabid ferrets). But this particular recipe required 12 onions, a full head of cabbage, eight carrots, four green peppers, two pounds of mushrooms…well, you get the picture. I would have starved to death if I’d tried to hand-chop all of that. So I blasted it all into ferret-chewed pieces in my food processor and tossed it into the 12-quart stock pot. Oddly, the pot was now full. Yet I still needed to add 16 cups of water, two large jugs of V8 juice and four large cans of chopped tomatoes. Something was wrong.

I found out what was wrong. The recipe called for 12 green onions. In my hunger-induced haze, I’d used 12 cooking onions—large cooking onions, too. I dragged out my second stock pot, split the huge mound of onions and other veggies as evenly as possible between the two pots and dumped in all the liquids. I cranked up the heat and stirred. After 20 minutes of stirring, it still didn’t look like cabbage soup. Something was wrong.

I found out what was wrong. My cabbage soup didn’t have any cabbage in it. The stupid cabbage had rolled into a corner when I was unpacking the groceries, and I’d cut up so many veggies, I hadn’t noticed that it was missing. I hadn’t made cabbage soup—I’d made a warm onion slushie.

I chopped up the damned cabbage and tossed it into the pots. The soup was supposed to simmer two hours before serving, but all I’d had to eat were two apples and some raspberries, and it was now mid-afternoon—I was so hungry my hands were shaking. So I ate two huge bowls of raw cabbage and onion slushie soup. That stopped the hunger pangs, but started a brand-new problem. The cabbage and onions have triggered some sort of weird chemical reaction in my belly. Now, stretching out between me and the keyboard is a monstrous mound where my stomach used to be. I look like I’m about to give birth to a walrus.

I’m going to go to bed before I get hungry again—I’d hate to see what another bowl of soup would do. Day Two is coming up. I’ll keep you posted.