An Atrocity of Soup

You are looking at me quizzically, I can tell. 'An atrocity of soup?', you ask. 'Surely this can't be correct? Surely it should be 'an atrocity of a soup, perhaps, if you are referring to soup in the singular?' Well, my imaginary and largely-rhetorical friend, to this I would reply that in my mind anyway, soup seems to be inescapably plural, thus 'an atrocity' is its collective term, like you have a herd of cattle. So there.

Semantics aside, it's time to discuss this week's culinary disaster. I really tried with this one. I mean, I actually followed a recipe. To be frank, I think that's where I fell down. Of all the hideous things I have cooked, and to be fair, I've cooked a few, this was one of the worst. The idea was to create a sort of semi-chicken noodle soup by adding stock cubes to boiling water and then cooking a nest of egg noodles (am I the only one who finds the term 'a nest' in reference to 'egg' noodles a bit disquieting? I mean, you don't measure bacon in half-pigs or whatever.) in said stock-cube water to create a kind of light soup. The book suggested that I fry an egg and add it to the bowl for a more nutritious meal, but the idea of that made me be a little bit sick in my mouth. So, in all honesty, I think that this was one of the worst things that I have ever created. It was like chewing straw through a pair of elderly lady's tights. No, it was like licking a single chicken nugget a thousand times and then rolling around in some grass. The 'soup' part made a kind of tepid chickeny bain-marie for the malevolent lump of semi-cooked noodles in the middle. Plus, in an exciting continuation of the kitchen thief saga (see previous posts), I now seem to possess only one spoon, and that is reserved solely for the eating of custard (I have a problem. Acceptance is the first step towards recovery), so I had to eat the noodles with a fork whilst attempting to drink the watery effluent from the bowl. I looked like Jar-Jar Binks or Zoidberg. It was a low, low moment in the annals of Reinbold.

Tastiness -1/10  - I give it a generous 1, in that I wasn't actually sick.

Likeliness to set off a fire alarm - 2/10  - Some use of the hob required. 

Likeliness to cause a fatal coronary, 20 years down the line - 2/10 - Not that unhealthy, apart from generating feelings of general self-loathing and despair.