Cooking with Chef Lorenzo in Orvieto!

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Friday (10/3)

Waking up at 5 am to leave for Orvieto. The train ride there was only an hour long. Chef Lorenzo picked us up from the train station and brought us to just outside the duomo around 9:30. He bought us cappuccinos and then left us, saying to meet him at his restaurant Zeppelin (named after Led Zeppelin) at 1:30. He wanted us to explore and find the restaurant on our own, which wasn't too hard as it was a small town. Having several hours to kill, I decided to check out the duomo first, with most of the other students. It cost 5 euros to enter the duomo and the side museums, which was weird because most cathedrals in Italy are free to enter, and I didn't find too much that was that spectacular about this one. There were two side chapels that were covered in frescos, and one had a unique reliquary in it but that wasn't too special. The facade of the duomo was rather cool because of all the painted frescos on the outside. The museums on the sides weren't that amazing either, just a lot of artwork from the 16th and 17th centuries. There was however a cool tunnel underneath the cathedral that we could walk through. There were a few whale bones displayed on the wall in there, which legend claimed they were dragon bones. Afterwards, Steven, the SLA in charge of the trip, pointed me to head in the direction of the town that had the fort and the deep well. Along the way I found several nice little community gardens along the street. They gave good views over the cliffs of the city. The wall of the fort however gave the best view out from the cliffs of the city to look out upon the small community below. Then I checked out St. Patrick's well nearby, which I would return to later, as I had to go to the restaurant for lunch. After our first gourmet meal of the weekend, we went to Lorenzo's farm outside of Orvieto in a small town called Bacchi. There we harvested grapes for a solid two hours. The manual labor felt great, reminding of the times I would work in my grandma's yard. I worked the back of the line, collecting all the bundles of grapes the others had missed. Most of the other students (girls mostly) were already complaining about it after only half way through. There was a contest to see who could guess how much sugar would be produced from the grapes we picked, Lorenzo saying to pick somewhere between 16 to 24%. The number ended up being 13%, and so the guy who guessed 17% won a bottle of wine that cost 54 euro. Afterward relaxing in his backyard for a long while, playing a bit of calcio and enjoying the nice view from his hilltop, we had a barbeque for dinner at Chef Lorenzo's house. There was so much delicious meat: sausages, roasted chicken and pork steaks. It was all so amazing, and I finished dinner with 6 small ice cream bars for dessert. Then he took us back to our hotel in Orvieto. Several of us went out to some bars with a couple of the chefs. At someone's suggestion, a few of us tried a shot of absinthe, the weird green alcohol that you light on fire. It tasted weird, like green apple licorice that was on fire. Yes, the taste was like it was still on fire. The other guy that tried it actually threw up afterwards. Nobody liked the taste of it and understood why it was illegal in America.





Saturday(10/4)

The hotel we stayed at provided us with weird towels. They were more like tablecloths really. But I guess it got the job done. Lorenzo met with us at 9 am to head to the market to get ingredients for the lunch we would be cooking. We started trying samples of everything and even had a cup of wine. Porchetta, wild boar sausage, salami, and all different types of cheeses, there was too much for everyone to eat all we were given, so I had to polish off the platters of all the samples we tried. then we headed back to the restaurant and started our cooking class. When he began telling us what we would be making, he looked and me and stopped what he was explaining. He said "this guy, he eats so much food, and he's so skinny. God bless you!" I suppose eating so much gelato at his house had left quite the impression on him. So we divided into different groups to make the different foods for our meal: fucciata bread, fried pizza, umbricelli pasta, and peaches with red wine for dessert.. I joined the chopping block for the peaches, dicing them up and soaking them in the red wine. While we let the peaches soak, we started cutting up garlic and onions for the sauce to go on the bread. The two girls I was working with couldn't handle the onions so I had to chop most of those. Then we finished up the dessert and had to leave the kitchen to begin our wine tasting session with our lunch. We tried two whites and two reds. The order of drinking them was from youngest and weakest to oldest and strongest. We learned to smell the cork after opening, check the color nail of the poured wine against a white backdrop, smelling the flavors of fruit or herbs, and finally tasting the sweet and then salty flavors of the wine. It was interesting to learn the different methods of tasting them, but the wine was wine so it was all good.
After lunch we were given several hours of free time before dinner. I took this opportunity to go explore St. Patrick's well, which cost money to go down into, but I believe it was worth it to climb down and up all 284 steps, going 175 feet deep. Of course I had to toss a coin in when I reached the bridge crossing the bottom of the well. The spiral staircase back up was different than the one going down, in order to make traffic more efficient. Then I left the city walls to explore the nature path just outside the town that looped around the cliffs the town sits on. It was a nice nature getaway with cliffs on my left and trees on the right. Shortly into the walk, I discovered a small bamboo forest just off the path. I had to go into it to find myself a nice walking stick. The one I found appeared to already be cut to a decent size, about 4 feet, I just had to break off a few branches from it. Everyone later asked me if I had bought the stick somewhere because of how nice it looks. Also on this nature path, just near the cliffs, I found what I expected to be prickly pear cacti. A little research on my phone informed that it indeed was, and was also safe to eat raw. So I picked one of the purple fruits and was very careful to remove the prickly spines before eating it. I still got stuck in a few of my fingers, but I split open the fruit to discover a purple juice with many small white seeds. I simply sucked out the juices and spit out the seeds. It was delicious, tasting like kiwi but less acidic. I then returned to the hotel for a small nap before dinner. The dinner was great, more interesting pasta. But the dessert was amazing. it was some sort of ricotta cheese yogurt dessert, with peaches on the inside and topped off with chocolate shavings and syrup. I wanted to ask the waiter for another, and luckily one of the guys didn't want his, so I got a second. I even licked the plate clean. The waiters then brought out some hard liquor for after dinner. They called it like moonshine, but it was only 46% alcohol. it didn't really have a taste to it, just a small of alcohol. There was also a slightly weaker liquor that tasted like mint. This was all on top of a bottle of red wine that I ended up consuming by myself. It was just a weekend full of wine.





Sunday (10/3)

This morning started out with some free time to ourselves. So I went with a group of others who wanted to go on the nature walk that I did the day before. We only did half of it this time, but I was able to show them the prickly pear, harvesting some for them to try, getting pricked all over my hands. Afterwards we were planning on planning calcio with some Italians kids they had played with the day before, but we unexpectedly had to check out of the hotel by 11 so we had to rush back there to pack our things up. And then we were back to play calcio for an hour and half straight against 8 or so of these 10 year old Italian boys. One of them was 16 or 17 and kept hogging the ball. The score was tied most of the game but we ended up winning by 2. Then we had lunch and received our certificates of "Italian farming and culinary experience in Orvieto" from Chef Lorenzo for our fine work we did cooking. It was very official looking, coming from his cooking school. Then we hit the train back to Rome. Since the cafeteria was closed by the time we got back, I ended up trying the local Chinese place. I got the orange chicken. Much, much different than American orange chicken, as this was topped with orange slices and actually was flavored like an orange. It was interesting, but just not as good as the gourmet meals we had been eating all weekend.

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