Garlic soup from Salamanca

I hate soup, I always get depressed when I have to eat it. Well that's not true, but soup is just so utilitarian, and always fills you up in the most practical way that I don't find any joy in eating it (stupid girl, this is why you're fat, food isn't supposed to bring you joy! Go out and get some friends) That's evidence of my depression manifesting into some kind of fully blown mental disorder - an alternate soup personality narrative (oh shut up).
Anyway, I picked this cute 70's book up in Oxfam (sorry about the tiny picture), I had a massive clear out a few days ago and cleared out about two shelves of books, so what better than to fill them straight up again! Never mind that after a spree I usually don't have any money left over to buy ingredients to make any meals, Theodora Fitzgibbon shows you how to make the most of it! Most of the recipes in this book call for only a few simple ingredients to make a variety of tasty quick nutritious meals for the whole family. Most recipes include a tip of what to do with leftovers, and there is even a chapter in the back about foraging for free stuff - very popular these days.
From what I understand Theodora (bitchin' name, by the way) travelled quite a bit, and has certainly written a buttload of different cookbooks, so there are a lot of Eastern European, Asian and Mediterranean recipes in the book, as well as traditional English, Scottish and Irish stuff.
I settled on this garlic soup because it looked incredibly easy, and I'm crazy about garlic (it's supposed to be a great mood elevator, I hear).
Basically, you fry up some whole cloves of garlic, then fry a little white bread in the garlic oil, and pour in some water, shove the pulverized garlic back in with some parsley and chorizo and then serve in a bowl over a poached egg. It takes about 10 minutes.
Result: I was actually too hungry to bother taking a photograph before I inhaled this, but I did take a picture of the ingredient that gave this soup most of it's flavour

Yes that's a garlic and parsley stock cube that the boyfriend's mum bought in a Portugese deli, and it was delicious!
About a minute before I turned the heat off and got ready to serve I gave it a little taste, and would you believe it, 6 cloves of garlic dissolved in 3 pints of water doesn't really yield a very strong taste! Reader, I was as shocked as you are, but apparently the equivalent of a teaspoon of garlic and a litre and a half of plain water don't magic into a substantial broth, incredible. The boyfriend decided that this was a typical example of the dumbing down of authentic cuisine for plebeian local tastes, but I'm going to be more generous and assume that '6 cloves of garlic' was meant to read '6 bulbs of garlic'.
Now the look, I always intended this blog to be very visual, so since I forgot to take a picture I'll try and describe the appearance as best I can. Imagine a thick slick of red oil entirely covering the creamy gray liquid beneath (Google 'BP disaster' if you're having trouble visualizing it). Artfully suspended in the almost entirely flavourless oil are shards of parsley, and just below, you can see sinister globs of gluten from the not quite dissolved hunks of bread. That's what you get for not cooking off the chorizo before adding it to the soup, and not chopping the slices of bread into tiny croutons.
APART FROM THAT IT WAS DELICIOUS!!!