Soup Five Days Ahead

The plan is beautiful in its simplicity: stand at the stove once, ladle the soup into five containers, label the lids by weekday with a marker, and until Friday forget about delivery and the eternal question of dinner. The containers line up in the fridge by height, and this is probably how an engineer feels handing over a bridge ahead of schedule.

✨ The astronomy for Sunday is modest: the Moon moves through Cancer, a homey, kitchen-minded sign, slowly waning, and in the middle of the afternoon the Sun and Saturn end up exactly across from each other. In astrology Saturn looks after routine and discipline, and around the house it looks rather culinary: right about then it seems sensible to make two pots at once and freeze half for November.

The soup behaves beautifully on Monday, decently on Tuesday, but by Wednesday lunch turns into Groundhog Day: the same taste, the same spoon, the same lid in your own handwriting saying WED, and for some reason that's the day your coworkers order pizza and discuss it loudly across the whole kitchen 🍕

By Thursday two containers are left, and you settle into mutual respect at a distance: you avoid looking at them, they pretend to still be fresh. Well, on Friday one goes to a dinner guest, the last one quietly lives on until Sunday, and the biggest pot goes back on the stove, this time, of course, for chili 🫕

By Wednesday lunch turns into Groundhog Day: the same soup, the same spoon, the same handwriting on the lid.