Too Much of a Good Thing

I made a couple of naive assumptions when I was making mushroom-barley soup last weekend.  Naive assumption #1: that I could cook barley in the soup water as you might do with pasta or rice.  Naive assumption #2: that I should throw in extra barley since I wasn't using any beef.

Apparently, barley will expand indefinitely to absorb all available water.  To shift metaphors, I theorize that if I threw 2 cups of barley into the ocean near my house, in an hour and fifteen minutes the condition of the Atlantic would be such that I could walk to Paris.  And while that's a tempting idea, I'm pretty sure it would disrupt shipping and we know how cranky people on cruise ships get when their trips don't go as planned.

I've been eating barley all week.  Live and learn.