Don't try this at home...

Aigo Bouido - Garlic Soup

I love garlic. I really really love garlic. On a cold day I like soup. Needing a quick recipe I thought this Aigo Bouido (Garlic Soup) recipe would be just the thing. Hmmmmmm, let's just say I've learned many things over the past couple of months and this taught me another important lesson -- never make this again!! I didn't even make any blunders as I prepared it, I carefully followed Julia's recipe (at least at first) and this just didn't taste good at all. It didn't taste bad, it just didn't taste good. I started this blog to share my adventures along the path of learning to cook better and it only seems fair to share the failures as well as the successes. Here's the story...

The recipe started off well with one of those fun cooking tricks I'd learned before - dropping the cloves of garlic into boiling water for just 30 seconds makes them very easy to peel. I used a whole bulb of garlic plus a couple of extra cloves (its okay, Julia said I could use more and promised that the taste would be very mild) and after boiling them they were cooled with cold water and drained.

The whole, peeled garlic cloves then went into a pot with two quarts of boiling water. Spices were added (cloves, bay leaf, thyme, sage, salt, and pepper) as well as parsley. Then three tablespoons of olive oil were added. Yuck. I'm still scratching my head over the addition of the oil. Have you ever heard the expression that oil and water don't mix? Its true, even if the water is boiling. Scratch scratch scratch.

After 30 minutes the soup was done and I did the taste test. That was fun, try taking a spoonful of the broth that has a layer of oil on it -- you end up with a spoonful of oil. I did manage to get to the "broth" and it tasted like...water. If I thought long and hard about it I could almost sense a bit of garlic taste but it pretty much tasted like hot oily water.

That's when the project went downhill as I tried to be creative and ad some flavor -- I added some more crushed garlic -- didn't help. I added some more cloves. Nope. I added some more pepper. No good progress -- still tasted like hot water with a bit of garlic after taste. Then it was time for drastic measures -- cream fixes everything so I added some cream to make it a Cream of Garlic Soup. Let's just say I'm pretty sure I know the reason Campbell's hasn't put this into one of their nice red and white cans. Now I had something that tasted like -- cream.

I was a desperate person trying to find something that would give this some tasty flavor. Spotting a container of shredded Parmesan cheese on the counter I figured I had nothing to lose. About a half cup of the cheese went in, the immersion blender continued to whir...and it didn't help. It tasted like something that wasn't poisonous or noxious but it certainly didn't taste like anything I'd want to eat again!

I do have a few brave family members - my sweet wife actually took a small bowl and my brave brother-in-law took a small bowl. They were braver than I, and kinder in their reviews as well. Both said "it was good" (yeah, right) and also admitted that it certainly wasn't one of my best concoctions. The good news is that I don't need to worry about what I'll serve this with in the future. I just hope it didn't clog the sink's drain...

Bon Appetit!