Kristen cat could eat no fat, Her mom could eat no lean, And so between the two of them, They licked the soup bowl clean.

This awful bastardization of a beloved children’s nursery rhyme is brought to you by Kristen Ann, hands down the cutest cat who has ever lived. It popped into my head last night as Kristen and I were enjoying our evening meal.

Remember that stupid joke from when you were a kid, “What’s grosser than gross?” It always ended in something that would never actually happen, like “sliding down a giant razor blade into a pool of alcohol,” which doesn’t seem gross so much as painful, but kids are dumb. Well, for me the thing that is grosser than gross is soggy bread. I don’t want to look at it, I refuse to touch it, and I’d rather be ass raped by a wild orangutan than have to eat it.

In general this is not really a problem because I don’t eat a whole lot of bread. The only time it comes into play is when I’m having French Onion soup. French Onion soup is my favorite soup in all the land. This may or may not* have to do with the fact that the whole thing is covered in a thick layer of melted cheese. For the uninitiated, it works like this: you poor some soup into a bowl or crock. Then you float a piece or bread on top. You cover the bread with a whole bunch of cheese and stick it under a broiler until the cheese is all melty and toasted. You then collapse in paroxysms of joy. Mmm, cheese…

The problem is once you have broiled your awesome cheese, you are left with a layer of soggy bread separating your cheese from your soup. As anyone who’s ever seen me eating French Onion soup can attest, I will spend the better part of 20 minutes carefully peeling back my cheese and fishing the bread out of my soup with my spoon. Many people have asked me, “Amberance, why don’t you just get the soup with no bread in it?” No friends, this is not an option. The bread is an integral part of the cooking process. Cheese does not float on its own, so without the bread my lovely cheese is going to sink to the bottom of my soup. If it’s under my soup instead of on top of it, it’s not going to get all toasted and bubbly when I stick it under the broiler. I have no choice but to use the bread and then carefully remove it (I’ve already tried wax paper. It doesn’t work.).

The result of this is that I end up with a pile of wet bread hanging out on my plate whilst I enjoy the bread-free fruit of my labor. Generally I turn it so the bowl is in between me and the bread so that I won’t have to look at it.

Kristen Ann is the most well behaved animal on the face of the planet – unless you’re eating something that she wants. When that happens she becomes quite the furry little behavior case. This was the situation earlier this week when I decided to make myself a delicious batch of soup. I sat down at the dining room table with my soup and a fat glass of chocolate milk and set about by pre-soup eating bread extraction. In the meantime, Miss Kris had realized I was eating something that smelled very much like beef. Curiosity led her to jump up on the dining room table. She’s not allowed on the dining room table and she knows it, but she also doesn’t care. I yelled at her and tried to swish her off the table, but she sidestepped my swipe and stayed on the table just out of my reach. I’m a pushover, so I ignored this and continued to work on the bread. Bread removed, I started in on my soup, slurping up onions and cheese with glee.

My little Kristen happens to be a goddamn kitty genius. Her grasp of science is unparalleled amongst cats. Noticing that I was engrossed in my cheese, Kristen took advantage and crept up to my plate. She sniffed at the bread, decided it was worth it and pawed a piece off of my plate on onto the table. She’s picky like her mom, and wanted nothing to do with wet bread either, but she did want to get at the beef flavor she knew it contained. Here is where her scientific genius kicked in, for she realized that applying pressure the bread would cause it to contract, releasing the beef broth it was currently holding. Armed with this knowledge, she pressed her little mitten paw down on the bread. Sure enough, the beef broth was released, wetting her little paw, which she then raised to her mouth to lick. It was so damn cute I didn’t bother trying to stop her. Instead I wrote a really stupid poem about the two of us sharing a bowl of soup.