I spent the night at my mom and dad's house last week. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but they live an hour south of San Francisco in Los Gatos. It's nice cooking in their kitchen this time of year because the view from the sink is quite beautiful. The hills surrounding their house are an electric shade of green and the old craggy-skinned oak trees are covered in moss and lichen. They say coyotes have been out recently, but when I was growing up it was mainly deer, skunk, and raccoon, (and the occasional rattle snake). I made a big pot of farro and bean stew for them - simple, hearty, and straightforward. They both went back for seconds, and I took that as a good sign.

This recipe below ended up being quite a departure from the recipe I photocopied, folded, and slipped into my overnight bag - regardless, I wanted to mention the book the inspiration came from - La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy. I've been reading through it at night. It's the culmination of the work of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina - an organization of thousands of members who would visit villages, towns, and farms all across Italy to document cooking techniques and ingredients - in order to preserve the culinary heritage of their country. The resulting volume is 930+ pages huge.

The farro soup section has five or six recipes and I thought, a wintery soup along these lines would be something everyone would like - particularly if each bowl had a nice dusting of grated Parmesan, and threads of olive oil on top.

Update: I made another pot of this last night for a friend, we had it drizzled with harissa/olive oil and a good amount of feta cheese. Highly recommended for those of you sitting on fresh harissa supplies from last week ;). Just do about 1/3 harissa paste to 2/3 olive oil - whisk well.