First put a handful of barley in some water to soak. Then chop an onion and saute very slowly in olive oil, until soft. Add three chopped garlic cloves and cook for 3 more minutes.

Add a handful of dried aduki beans (not traditional, but they cook fast), a small glass of red wine, some tinned tomatoes, a generous squeeze of Italian vegetable puree, lots of water or vegetable stock (I used a pint of home-made veg stock that I had in the freezer, and topped it up with water and a little bit of vegetable stock powder), and simmer it until the beans are almost cooked.

Add a diced carrot, some sliced green beans (I chopped these last night while I had the chopping board out, and stuck them in the fridge), half a diced celery stalk, 3 or 4 thinly-sliced outer leaves from a Savoy cabbage, and the soaked barley, with its soaking water or not, as you like.

Simmer it till the barley and vegetables are cooked, adding a bit of Marmite (yeast extract), some garlic puree, some nutritional yeast flakes (as a Parmesan substitute) and some fresh basil pounded with celery salt and olive oil towards the end to help thicken and flavour it.

The thinking behind the minestrone: I pre-soaked the barley since raw barley added into a soup has a tendency to soak up all the liquid and the associated flavours. I put the vegetables in late because I didn't want to over-cook them. I used garlic puree as well as fresh garlic both for its thickening effect and because I wanted to have some garlic that was only briefly cooked, since I like the flavour of briefly-cooked garlic. I left the saltier ingredients to the end as too much salt can slow down the softening of the beans. This soup turned out really nice, and I'll be making it again.

I used a combination of recipes from Elizabeth David's "Italian Cooking".