Our dog Mina, as some lucky souls have experienced firsthand, sometimes exhibits a hacking cough. The cough, impossible to ignore, is the result of heart disease. Before you go feeling sorry for her, please note that thanks to hundreds of dollars worth of veterinary care and medications, her cough is managed very well, she is happy and pretty much doing better than all of us. Taking long naps in the sunny floor patches of our dining room. Stealing whole halves of sandwiches from helpless children because she is sneaky and quick.

She is simply going to continue to cough from time to time, as well as need to be let out approximately one million times a day, thanks to her diuretic. So what you can do, is start feeling sorry for us.

In order to cope, I took to poetry, which my father compared to the "deconstructive poetry of the modern nihilists, echoing despair which is the true reality of man." Definitely.

Love you, kill you, what?
Your coughing is so damn loud
Little dog Mina

Psychiatric care!
I can't live live this no more!
Emphysema sound

Watching Mina sleep
Love swelled, until I noticed
The urine leaking

And one from Justin:

A cough and a cough
And a hack that's mostly retched
Yet nothing comes out

So. I wasn't super adventurous this first month of recipe-trying. This was an pretty simple one, which I found on The Splendid Table website. But I wanted to get the ball rolling as it is mid-January and I'm not fluent in Spanish or anything yet.

I liked this soup a lot, and it was even better the next day. The kids liked it too, although Nora outright refused to try a bean. To even put it on her tongue. So she worked around them. But I've recommitted lately to simply making a a meal for dinner and that's that. You don't get anything else, even if you are seven and very hungry and "do NOT LIKE BEANS! You KNOW I don't like them!" When Adriana was born I let things slip a bit, choosing to make life easier by not pushing the boundaries much as far as food was concerned. But I love food, and it's time to start experimenting again. Nora, you had it easy this month, but watch out.

3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped
1 carrot, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 small yellow onion, coarsely chopped
Leaves from 3 sprigs fresh rosemary, finely chopped
6 cups vegetable stock
1 15-oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
8 oz. cavatelli
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tbsp. finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, for serving

Heat oil in a 6-qt. saucepan over medium-high. Add celery, carrot, onion, and rosemary and cook until soft, 8–10 minutes. Add stock and chickpeas and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove half of chickpeas and purée until smooth; return chickpeas to pan. Add pasta and cook until al dente, 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with parsley and Parmigiano sprinkled on top.

Haikus about Mina's coughing

Chickpea & Cavatelli Soup (recipe #1, January)