Soup...soup....soup......crap, it's still there

I'm going to start this one off with a confession: I hate homemade soup. I freaking hate homemade soup. I can stand creams and chowders, and a few of the canned/packaged noodle soups. Heck, give me any sort of ramen (even the 25 cent one) and I'll down it happily! But just the thought of a "nice", healthy, full of condiments and stuff whose name I can't remember, 4-hour-slow cooking-broth homemade soup makes me want to gag.

Thing is, I have no problem with eating greens and vegetables. Take them out of the soup, I'll eat them happily. Except cilantro. (That thing tastes like dug up pet corpses mixed with muddy grass. Well, I've never eaten dug up pet corpses, but I'm sure that if somebody cut their grass in a rainy day and then decided to mix an old hamster buried in the yard with the muddy grass residues, that's what it would taste like; but I'm getting off track here...) Anyways, what I really can't stand is the broth. I hate it. Over the years I've tried everything to try to make it taste better:

Adding rice to it (helps mask the flavor, but doesn't take it away)

Potato chips

Real potatoes

You name it, I've tried it. Nothing helps.

As I've grown up, I've gotten better at eating them. Not because I like them. Definitely not because I've gotten used to them. It's because my brain got used to "behaving like an adult to give the kids a good example" so now instead of this:

When I'm invited somewhere and given soup, I eat it...reluctantly.

Soup was a particular nightmare as a kid. There's a particular, traditional soup where I come from, called "Olla de Carne". That translates into Pot of Meat. Talk about misleading advertisement!!! It's a LOT of broth with dozens of different vegetables inside of it, and a bit of meat. The meat pieces cook in the broth for so long they TASTE like the broth. It's completely disgusting (though most people seem to love it). My mom likes it so much, she would make it a lot when I was growing up. And that was HORRIBLE for me.

It was a nightmare for my little brother as well. Now, my younger brother was a much more normal child. He hated vegetables. Loathed them.So, while he loved the broth and meat, a soup so full of vegetables could only come out of the darkest nightmares for him.

My brother and I have very different personalities, but one crucial thing in common: We're both frustratingly stubborn and don't mind challenging authority if we think the battle is worth it. When it came to that soup, it was definitely worth it.

My mom couldn't stay there forever, so she left us there and came to check every couple of minutes. We were determined not to move. Who cares about the sunny day outside, this was a battle of principles. One we were not going to lose.

Now, that could have lasted forever, except for one fact. We were stubborn little kids, yes, but we were not stupid. In fact, quite the opposite. We were strategically-smart little brats. So it didn't take us too long to figure out that what each other hated was exactly what the other one loved. And so: operation "fool mom" was in order.

This was a winning strategy. Absolute genius. I don't even recall if my mom ever found out what we were doing. We thought we had this beat. Soup was no longer the ruler of our meal nightmares! We had looked into the soul of horror itself and survived. We had conquered: SOUP.

This happiness would have lasted forever and ever and ever. Until a new nightmare we could not have foreseen invaded our kitchen:

To this day, I cringe at the sight of fish heads.

P.S. Mom, if you're reading this, I do have to say I am not sorry...it was a matter of survival. I AM sorry that I  can't seem to draw you properly. Don't worry, you look nothing like that. For starters, you're tri-dimensional and with a nose. I'd say that makes a lot of difference.