Cooking Class!

Okay sorry mom that I haven't blogged in a while, it's crazy on this side of the Atlantic!  Last Friday could have been one of the best experiences in my life thus far.  For my food class, we went on a field trip to the Tuscan hills to cook a home cooked meal.  If you know me at all, you know that I can't cook if my life depended on it.  We took a tour of the winery and saw exactly how wine is made.  From there we went to a family's house that runs a non-profit cooking class just simply to educate people about the proper way to handle food.  They were the nicest people and had the cutest baby ever who I plotted to steal more than once... woops. So my class of 20 all huddled around this one table as they told us what we were going to cook.  They told us it was going to be a crustini course, 2 different pasta dishes, a meat dish, and tiramisu.  We were going to split up and all take on different parts of the meal and come together and eat it as a little family at the end.  Each group was assigned to do something different.  My group went to what we called "the reject room" because we were picked last like the un-athletic kids in gym class.

We were paired with this women named Bernadetta who spoke very little English.  One of my friend Brittany has been taking Italian classes here and so with the help of her, we were trying to learn the language by communicating with her!  It was cool to get out of the American-ized Florence where there really is very little language barrier to try to be challenged a little bit.  Our group was in charge of the crustini.  We had to dice up all sorts of things like tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, parsley, etc.  Definitely not the most exciting thing we could have been in charge of, but we had a great time doing it.

Meanwhile, members of our class were making fresh pasta completely from scratch.  They made ravioli's stuffed with spinach and cheese which was a really cool process.

They also made homemade gnocchi!! I thought that was incredible because of all it entails with the potato and pasta involved.  Us in the reject room got stuck with the easy stuff but it's okay it was probably for the best.  Here's some pictures of the finished products-

All in all, this was a GREAT experience, I had the best day ever.  And don't worry, I got all of the recipes!!!