Slurping hot soup on a cold night

Say it’s a cold, bone-shivering night.

Say there’s snow shooting sharp, shooting sideways, shooting into your eyes, and the wind is just howling and twirling into mini-tornadoes, slicing and dicing deep through your coat and into your chest. Your fingers are icicles, your nose a dented, frozen strawberry, and your cheeks look like someone ran them over with a cheese grater a few times.

On nights like this, just face it: You’re an ice-cold mess.

You need to get home fast and eat some soup.

Yes, you need to stomp your boots, shake the snow off your jacket, let your glasses steam up, and touch-feel your way to the kitchen to heat it up, pour it up, snag those saltines up, and sit right down to slurp up one of life’s great pleasures:

• Temperature check. That soup’s steaming hot and you’re ice cold and now is not the time for First-Degree Tongue Burn. Make sure your slurps force cooler air into your mouth to chill the soup out a bit. It’s like cooling beer bottles in the freezer for a few minutes or nuking the cold half of your dinner for ten seconds to heat it back up—just some temperature knob twiddling to get it jussssssst right.

• Our ancestors did it. What, do you think cavemen sipped their soup politely? No, I bet they slurped it straight from the saber-tooth skull and loved doing it. Next time your date pops up from her steak with gravy on her cheeks, meat in her teeth, and mashed potato in her hair, just flash a big thumbs-up and start slurping your soup. It’s all about embracing our common roots.

• Get closer. To slurp properly, you may need to hunch right on over the soup bowl. Yes, lean those shoulders forward and let that steam fog up your glasses and thaw your face. You are a few inches closer to being at one with the soup. It’s your Chicken Noodle Moment of Zen.

So next time you get home from a long and cold walk home, just heat up some soup and start laying down some wet and juicy slurps.

Also works with hot chocolate.

AWESOME!