This is a soup to crave, which is quite unfortunate because it’s not a soup that you can make with a moments thought. First you have to soak beans overnight, two nights if you are being particularly good. You also have to soak the farro for many hours, although since you are already soaking the beans, that’s the least of the worries. Then, you still have to cook the beans for up to 3 hours until they are butter soft (undercooked beans just will not do).

I am kind of a soup person. I always want to know what the soup special is when I dine out. When I eat by myself, there’s a good chance it will be a bowl of soup. I love having a big pot of stock bubbling away on the stove, in anticipation of good soups to come.

In fact, I was all fired up to try the Fennel Blossom Soup in The Herbal Kitchen this week.

I don’t know about where you are, but everywhere I turn, someone is getting sick. I, knock on wood, have managed to avoid it so far but my poor not-so-little one has gotten some kind of fever inspiring crud twice now in the last month. I’m still not sure how I’ve avoided it… it must be all that lard.

You might remember me mentioning my so-called organizaitonal system for recipes that I get from my somewhat ridiculous number of magazine subscriptions. I have a list that I maintain that I tag with the issue and page info, as well as some basic search criteria to help me find the recipes later. For example, I’d tag an apple pie recipe dessert, sweet, apples, fruit, pie, tart, fall, so that next time I have apples and am wondering what to do with them, I can see all the recipes that I thought looked good. It’s a pretty simple system, which is good because anything that would be complicated just won’t get used in the first place. I’d see recipes and forget to log them and they would be lost in the bookshelves and boxes forever. Over the past year, I’ve tagged over 300 recipes that looked tempting enough for me to notice and want to come back to.

Jack, to you. It’s Dad to me. And this is another recipe from my family cookbook. My dad was never afraid to get into the kitchen, and when he cooks, we always know we’ll get something good. His specialties have always been breads… hand-pressed tortillas and homemade white or wheat loaves. He’d hate the no [...]