J.K. Rowling misplaced one of her notebooks. As she writes in her on-line diary, she remembered the notebook as containing essential ideas so imaginative that she would never be able to duplicate them, leading to the mournful result of an impoverished next book. Well, maybe our lost pea soup won't affect as many people as those devoted to the Harry Potter books, but we are upset all the same.

Now this isn't just a misplaced recipe. This was a heavenly creation that L. improvised last Sunday night. As dusk painted the clouds a pink grey and temperatures fell, the split peas beckoned to us. Within a couple of hours, we were congratulating ourselves on such a perfect split pea soup - one that captured the very essence of peas. We enjoyed it so much that we decide to make it again the following day, only this time taking note of quantities and procedures so we could write it up for Foodatista.

This pea soup has now taken on mythic proportions in our minds, for the following day's soup tasted nothing like the one on Sunday night. It's like in the film business, when the rehearsal is the best performance, but you didn't get it on film. And every subsequent take is compared to it and the memory of that rehearsal is magnified into the Oscar winning performance that can never be recaptured.

So what are we to do? Well, we will try it again and report back to you how it goes. Have you cooking improvisers ever had this happen to you?

By the way, J. K. Rowling found her notebook, but discovered that it contained few of the brilliant ideas that she had imagined. But I'm sure our pea soup was exceptional.