Italy, Day 4

[ladysprite]

While our entire vacation was unquestionably amazing, I'll admit that this class was the thing I was anticipating most of all. When our travel agent let us know that she'd managed to find us an all-day-long immersive cooking class taught in a "medieval village" outside Rome, I figured that there was no way that it could be half as good as I wanted it to be - but that even if that was the case, it would likely be a lot of fun.

It was as good as I wanted it to be.

The day started out, as usual, at an unnaturally early hour with breakfast at the hotel, followed by a taxi ride to the travel agency that the "cooking adventure" was run through. We had about a half-hour wait there, during which I amused myself by trying to read all the travel brochures in Italian (hey, it was early, and I'm easily amused) until we met the rest of our companions for the day. Our teacher, Monica, turned out to be an incredibly sweet, enthusiastic, chatty older lady. Our only classmate, alas, turned out to be Canada's Only Douchebag.

(I have been told, and have learned from personal experience, that Canada is generally populated by polite, thoughtful, good people. Apparently they manage this by unloading an entire nation's worth of negative traits onto one unfortunate and unpleasant individual, whom they then send abroad.)

We piled into Monica's car and started driving out of the city, whereupon she started trying to discuss our menu plan for the day and our classmate started making unfunny jokes about women drivers and demanding that our class involve plenty of liquor. We did our best to ignore him, and hashed out something like a menu. En route to our final destination, we stopped at the butcher shop, coffee shop (for mandatory cappuccinos), a greengrocer's shop about the size of our back patio that had the most beautiful peppers, artichokes, and squash, and a grocery store with an epically impressive cheese counter. umbran and I gawked like the foodie tourists we were. Classmate broke a bottle of wine, then insisted on standing outside and complaining about the wait.

In the interest of honesty, I must admit here that I utterly failed to like coffee. I've never been a fan of it anyway; it never tastes as good as it smells. But I promised myself I'd try it again while I was in Italy, and when Monica insisted we all stop for cappuccino, I figured it was a good chance to do just that. Unfortunately, it just tasted like soggy ashes. I kept adding sugar in hopes of making it palatable; ultimately it wound up tasting like cloyingly sweet soggy ashes. Ah, well.

Eventually we ended up in what did, in fact, look like a genuine medieval village, complete with stone buildings, narrow streets that you can't fit a car on, and picturesque overlooks. We left the car behind and trekked our groceries up to the house we would spend the day cooking in, where I immediately fell in love with the view from the balcony.


Everything in Italy is beautiful.

And then we spent the next four hours cooking. Monica was amazing, explaining the theory and reasoning behind everything she did, even as she utterly failed to use anything even vaguely like a recipe. This was a rather eye-opening experience for me; even though I've been cooking for decades and am perfectly capable of improvising, adapting, and adjusting, I never quite trust my skills enough to go completely recipe-free. I know it's a crutch, but it's still scary to go without, and this was impressively fun and liberating. Our classmate continued to make inappropriately sexist jokes, stick his hands into other people's work, and pull things away from umbran and myself on the stated grounds that he could do it better and/or faster, but it was easy enough to ignore him and just go look out the kitchen window instead -


View from the kitchen, complete with picturesque cat. See? I feel better already.

We started out with two different kinds of bruschetta - one topped with a standard tomato-basil-garlic mix, and the other just topped with Italian sausage, since we had extra sausage from another recipe. It was interesting to see Monica's take on garlic, too; rather than the heavy hand I've come to expect in Italian American cooking, she treated it a lot more delicately. For most of the dishes, she'd just add whole cloves while the food cooked or marinated, taking them out again just before serving.


Bruschetta! Alas, we are not food photographers, but trust me - it was yummy.

After that came three different kinds of pasta - ravioli, potato gnocchi, and picchi, each with their own sauce. My only previous experience with pasta was a single abortive attempt spoiled by a cheap machine and my own impatience, so having a teacher to guide me through was invaluable.


Pasta, pasta, pasta!

The ravioli were stuffed with zucchini, ricotta and parmesan, and served with a sauce made from butter, sage, and some of the leftover filling. The gnocchi were served with a sauce made of carrots, celery, braised short ribs, tomatoes, and pecorino cheese. And the picchi, a kind of pasta made with just flour and water, rolled out without a machine, and hand-shaped, were served with a puttanesca sauce (made with some of the leftover tomatoes from the bruschetta) and bread crumbs. And they were all outrageously delicious, and unreasonably easy to make.

Then came the main course, which started with chicken two different ways. One dish was chicken cubed and marinated in oil, balsamic vinegar, sugar, and rosemary, then sauteed; the other was chicken thighs pounded flat, stuffed with sausage, peppers, and provolone, and sauteed in butter and wine. These were served with roasted potatoes with garlic and rosemary and baked cherry tomatoes stuffed with provolone and seasoned bread crumbs.


I know it's hard to see - brown food on brown plate. Apologies for that....

And finally, dessert was tiramisu. I was a little skeptical at first, since I'm not a huge fan of coffee, but this was delicious beyond any reason, as well as ridiculously simple to make. She used a kind of crunchy cookie instead of ladyfingers, and mocha instead of straight coffee, and I cannot wait to make this again as soon as anyone gives me even the vaguest excuse.


She had run out of pretty plates by this time.

After that we helped her tidy up the kitchen and dining room, and talked about family and food and hobbies and travel and just about anything else we could think of, before packing up and wandering back to her car and from there back to the city, bidding goodbye to the adorable village.


Did I mention how beautiful it was?

By the time we got back to Rome it was late afternoon. We decided to walk back to our hotel from the travel agency, since it was another gorgeous sunny day and we were starting to feel comfortable enough with the area that we weren't too worried about getting lost. We wound up back at the Villa Borghese just in time to catch the most glorious sunset ever, and from there headed back to our hotel for the evening.


Sunset over St. Peter's Basilica. Can you believe some people get to see this every day?

After that, we packed our things so we could get an early start the next morning - this was our last day in Rome. We went for another walk later that night, and narrowly avoided getting lost, but that's not nearly as fun as the rest of the adventures, so I choose not to remember that, and instead end our day and our time in Rome with good food, beautiful sunsets, and an incredibly patient husband who did, in fact, know more or less where we were the whole time. More or less.

Tomorrow, Venice!

Comments

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Some other pictures from that day as before, on Flickr.

I have to admit not being a fan of coffee, either, but at least this time I could understand why some people do like it - I'm just not one of those people. I also just couldn't take the wine. Not my cup of... wine.

[wren13.livejournal.com]

Wow, what a great way to end your vacation. Awesome!

[umbran.livejournal.com]

That wasn't the end of the vacation - that was merely the end of our stay in Rome, only the halfway point in the vacation. We went from there to Venice...

[crash-mccormick.livejournal.com]

Coffee is pretty bad. Coffee Ice Cream is lovely tasting like coffee smells. Coffee or cappuccino Gellato is fabulous. But I already mentioned that place in Florence by the Ufitzi.

[lisagw.livejournal.com]

If you are ever in Istanbul, I have a similarly awesome lady to recommend who does food tours in the market, then cooks at her home with you.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a wonderful experience - glad it turned out so well! And I think you're right about the freakishly unpleasant Canadian.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

(I have been told, and have learned from personal experience, that Canada is generally populated by polite, thoughtful, good people. Apparently they manage this by unloading an entire nation's worth of negative traits onto one unfortunate and unpleasant individual, whom they then send abroad.)

As an expat Canadian, this made me laugh like blazes. <3

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a wonderful day of cooking, and I love Tiramisu, so if I end up near your place, please consider that sufficient excuse to make some! :)

(Also, sorry about the Canadian.)

[gmkieran.livejournal.com]

sounds like most excellent fun!!! (despite the Canadian - can't imagine why he took the class in the first place - you should have asked that picturesque cat to cross his path several times on your way out ;) )

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Call me strange, but that look over the shoulder from the cat made me think the cat was saying "You want me to take care of that mook? Because I can, you know." He probably never knew how lucky he truly is not to cross paths with that cat.

[tikva.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for these wonderful stories and pictures!

And you are a WAY better person than I am. As soon as the guy started bitching about women drivers, I'd have yelled, "Hey, Monica! This guy says he'd rather walk!" But then, I am the proverbial bull in the china shop. ;)

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

That was a wonderful story; thank you for sharing!