Favorite Farro Recipes

I've been trying, all the month of February, to do a long and elegant post, in keeping with Valentine's Day and heart health awareness themes, of the foods we cook for the people we love -- all about the comfort food we make for the sick, the sexy food we make for our dates, the full-on holiday feasts we spend a week or more preparing to celebrate in the dark days of winter with our nearest and dearest.

But February is a short month, and I never got around to it. February sucks! The days are short, the weather is cold, it snows, and the only holidays are an excessively corporatized celebration of beer-drinking and guacamole eating, and an excessively corporatized celebration of, I dunno, chocolate truffles and long-stemmed roses. And President's day.

Instead, I proffer a couple of my favorite recipes for farro, a lovely, nutty whole grain that's easy to prepare. This lovely combination of farro and pureed borlotti beans in a soup is evocative of something the Roman legionnaires themselves might have eaten; this super combination of roasted squash and onions, thyme, walnut oil and a dash of balsamic gets a filling oomph from teh grain. Either make a filling vegetarian entree or a lovely first course or side dish to grilled fish or lamb chops.

If you don't want to go headlong down the new recipe path, you could also substite farro in any recipe for which you'd use barley or spelt; soak it in chicken broth and substitute it for wild rice pilaf; toss your typical Caprese salad ingredients in with it and convert a first-course standby into a meatless main.

Speaking of balsamic, I'd be remiss if I didn't alert you to Zingerman's balsamic blowout through March 16th. The free shipping is a boon to those of us no longer privileged to live in Ann Arbor. If you are still a culinary novice making do with that balsamico di modena stuff from the grocery store, I highly recommend you pony up and get a life buy a bottle (the 10-year balsamic's a good place to start).