¼ cup butter
4 cups chopped peeled cucumbers
1 cup chopped fresh green onions
¼ cup all-purpose flour
4 cups chicken broth
½ cup half-and-half
Salt and pepper to taste

My wife, Carol, had lunch with her parents this past Tuesday. She brought home three big cucumbers from her father’s garden. Wednesday morning I found our Good Housekeeping Cookbook on the counter, opened to Chilled Cucumber Soup.

Now, I am not a fan of cold soup. Soup should be hot. Nor am I a fan of cucumbers. They taste like sour watermelon to me. I am the cook in the house, however. Out of self-preservation. Carol was not born with the cooking gene. Plenty of other goods genes that made her worth marrying, mind you, but not the cooking gene. So the cucumbers and the open cookbook meant that I would have to make her some cucumber soup. That is how communication works at our house.

“Do we have everything we need for it?” I asked as she headed out to the garage.

“Yes,” she said. We kissed good-bye.

The recipe said that the soup should be made several hours in advance so it can chill in the refrigerator. I did not read this until 5:30, however, and Carol returns home from work at seven. If I were going to chill the soup even a little, I’d have to work fast.

I washed and peeled the cucumbers and cut them into half-inch cubes. I went to the refrigerator for the green onions called for in the recipe. We had no green onions. So, I cut up a yellow cooking onion.

The recipe said to melt the butter in a skillet and then cook the cucumber and onion until the onions were tender. We didn’t have any butter. But we did have a tub of Smart Balance Lite. As this yellowy substance melted in the skillet, I went to the cupboard for the chicken broth. As I fruitlessly searched through the great jumble of canned goods, I burned the yellowy substance black.

Muttering a few of my favorite one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words, in sentences that contained my wife’s name, I scrubbed the charcoal out of the skillet. I also completed my search for chicken broth. We didn’t have any. Nor did we have any chicken bullion cubes. What we did have was a jar of turkey gravy left over from Thanksgiving. I diluted it in water, producing a delightful broth.

I melted more Smart Balance in the skillet and added the cucumbers and onion. When the onions were tender, I stirred in the flour. Then I added the turkey broth. I brought it to a boil and let it thicken. I added the salt and pepper.

I poured the concoction into a mixing bowl and put it in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator in the hope it would chill in time As I did this, I was reminded of that old story where the husband clubs his wife to death with a frozen beef roast, then cooks and eats it so there isn’t any evidence of the murder weapon. I decided that a frozen bowl of cucumber soup probably could not deliver a lethal blow. And even if it did, I’d then have to eat the stuff and, as I’ve said, I don’t like cold soup or cucumbers.

I now read ahead to see what the next steps were. I was going to need some half-and-half. I knew we didn’t have any of that. What we had was the skim milk Carol forces me to drink. No real butter. No half-and-half. This wasn’t going to be the richest of soups.

I was also going to need the blender to puree the concoction. I knew where the blender was. In the cupboard under the cooktop. Behind the crockpot, waffle iron and the George Forman Grill. Growling lightly, I got down on my knees and entered the cupboard up to my waist. I pulled out the plastic pouring pitcher part of the blender. I pulled out the base. I did not pull out the rubber top to the pitcher because it wasn’t in there. Growling heavier now, I searched all the cupboards. No blender top. Now how was I going to puree that stuff without a blender top? Without it splattering all over the place like, well, like someone’s blood?

Once blended (however I was going to do that) the puree was to be poured through a strainer to get out all of the cucumber seeds. I checked the big basket of cooking gadgets on the counter. We no longer had a strainer apparently.

I fired off an email to Carol at work. It said this: “Sweetie, if you want to have this f-in’ cucumber soup for supper you’ll have to stop and get some half-and-half and a strainer.” I turned on the TV and watched Wolf Blitzer.

Carol arrived home at 7:15 with the half-and-half and the strainer. She also had a bundle of green onions. “You’re going to need these, too,” she said. I told her it was too late for the green onions and suggested where she could put them. It wasn’t in the refrigerator vegetable bin.

I retrieved the cucumber concoction from the freezer. It was not chilled yet of course, but hey, whose fault was that? I poured it into the blender. I held the lid of a Tupperware bowl over the top and turned it on low. I didn’t lose a drop of the green, room-temperature goo.

I started to pour it through the new strainer. “I hope you washed the strainer before you used it,” Carol said. I told her I hadn’t. “Oh honey,” she said, “who knows what kind of germs could be hiding in those little holes!”

“Really bad ones, I hope,” said I.

I mixed the half-and-half into the soup. Poured Carol a big bowl of it. “Aren’t you going to have any?” she asked.

“I’ll make myself a bowl of cereal,” I said.

We took our respective dinners to the sunroom. We sat at the glass-top table and looked out at our sun-frazzled impatiens. “How was your day?” she said.

“Good,” I said. “How was yours?”

“Good,” she said.”

I watched her take a spoonful of the cucumber soup. “How it is?” I asked.

“Not as good as I thought it would be,” she said.

I ground my Cheerios between my molars until all thoughts of homicide were gone.

Hence the name Close Call Cucumber Soup.