I am very excited for completely, believe it or not, because I had some new cookbooks arrive yesterday, they we massively reduced on Amazon and are just full of so many ideas. The problem I have with cooking at the moment is that I have so many ideas running around my head but I just do not have the time to make them all. To do that I would need to cook all the time.
Recipe creation seems to have totally taken over my mind and I spend most of my time thinking about what to make, how to make things vegan and how to adapt recipes to the ingredients I have. I also look up traditional recipes and see ways in which I can maybe make them a bit more modern or change them slightly to suit my tastes. This was one of those recipes as I have wanted to make a Tuscan bean soup for ages and finally got round to it.
One of the things I did before making this soup was a bit of research on traditional ingredients and techniques, there were many versions of this classic recipe, some involved using bread and some mentioned using Farro which is an ancient grain, similar to spelt and is only really found in Italy. So I was in my local health food shop and hunted around for Farro, I found this box of stuff, called Farro, with mainly Italian writing and went for it. When I opened it my first reaction was this can’t be right? It looked like sugar puffs and reading the box it said it was puffed spelt, I was still not sure so did some research and Farro is a grain but Farro Soffiato is puffed spelt and used as a breakfast cereal. I was part way through making my soup at this stage. So as a result I used giant couscous instead but I think that Bulgar wheat would have worked well too.
The moral of this story is that I need to do proper research and read my packets before I buy something but look out for breakfast recipes using puffed spelt in the near future, it is really yummy!
