Hello October! The week is painted with the golden colors of Autumn and one of the most prepared dishes at this time of the year, according to my family tradition, is a delicious creamy faba beans purée. Simple ingredients to make a tasteful recipe that requires an easy way of execution, which can be also applied to different kinds of pulses (dried seeds). In this case, at the food market, I chose faba beans with no seedcoat.

• You need from half to one coffee cup of pulses per person.
• Wash the pulses and then dip them in a bowl filled with water, add a table spoon of salt to water, leave the pulses in the bowl for 6/8 hours or a night.
• Strain the pulses when you are ready to cook them.
• Pour fresh water in a pot (for tradition we cook pulses in a pot made of clay, that is a “pignata”). The proportion between pulses and water should be around 1:3. Add the pulses.
• You may also add other ingredients in the pot to have a rich flavoured purée, like some extravirgin olive oil, petals of onion, a clove of garlic, tomatoes, celery and carrot.
• Slowly cook the faba beans, until they will absorb the liquid (water + vegetables) and become a creamy purée. It will take about a couple of hours.
• Add a sprinkle of salt and pepper in the end.

Before serving the purée of faba beans, heat a pan, add very thin slices of bacon, make them crisp. (Perhaps, the purée should taste even better by using lard instead of bacon, but, because of still high temperatures, it is pretty difficult to find it in the South of Apulia at this time of the year). In the same pan, add some cubes of homemade bread, make them warm and fragrant with the fat of the bacon.

On top of the purée, add a curl of crisp bacon and warm cubes of homemade bread. Serve the dish warm and enjoy it!