Where's the stalker??

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Wednesday, May 19th:

Clouds were rolling in this morning, so we wondered if it would rain at all, since yesterday was so nice! And…my voice stared to return! Yay!! We ate our breakfast, (yes…Nutella again…yum…) and then walked down to the tower kitchen for our second day of cooking class. Today was the more expensive and more in-depth class, so I had just signed myself up for it. I had arranged for Kenya to observe the class, read, and play her DS player during the class (I bought her two new games and surprised her with them that morning). So we walked in the front door and met the other chef that teaches classes. His name was Alberto, and he was blond and approx. 30 years old. He preferred Abba and Queen over opera, so we had a different experience than the day before. Today, we had a slightly larger group…a couple from Kansas City, a couple from Kalamazoo, a couple from Blaine (yes…Blaine, WA), and two girls from Brazil.



On the menu today:



Anti pasti (appetizer)

Fiori di zucchine ripieni al forno (Oven baked stuffed zucchini flowers)

Primi (first course):

Ravioli di Patate alla Mugellana (Potato ravioli from Mugello) with,

Sugo all’ anatra (Duck ragu)

Secundo (second course):

Involtini di vitella al latte (Veal rolls cooked in milk)

Contorni (side dish):

Risotto con le zucchine (Zucchini risotto)

Dolci (dessert):

Pannacotta (cooked cream- like a pudding)

Salsa di cioccolato (chocolate sauce)



We, again, started with making the dessert first. Pannacotta is basically a pudding made from cream, pure vanilla bean, sugar, and gelatin. Once boiled, you pour it into individual cups or ramekins and let it sit in the refrigerator for a few hours…it seems like the perfect dessert for parties, etc., because you can pre-make it and store it until the party. Since our group was bigger, we broke into smaller groups for the hands-on lessons. Alberto taught his class way different than Maurizio did…Alberto had us follow the recipes in our books, and he gave us guidance where needed. I was paired with the couple from Kansas, Kelly and John. They were SUPER nice and completely fell in love with Kenya. Kelly was telling me that she and John were gearing up to adopt a child from China in the next year or two. They are about my age, and John works for a company that designs fiber optics, so he travels quite extensively…in fact, he has over 1 million frequent flyer miles! Anyway, I was super excited to make stuffed zucchini flowers! That was one of my requests when I signed up for the class. Italians usually stuff them and deep fry them, but today we were going to make the oven baked kind. We delicately cleaned the flowers, peeled away the stems, plucked off the stamens and stuffed them with ricotta and pecorino cheese. After all of the flowers were stuffed and layered in a baking dish, we covered them with a béchamel sauce and cut up tomatoes and baked them…personally, I sorta wish we could have tried the fried ones…you know me and fried food !



After preparing the antipasti, we started on making pasta for the ravioli. Well, that was when Kenya’s ears perked up! After yesterday, she knew SHE was the expert! When we started mixing the flour and eggs, Kenya pushed me out of the way, and declared, “I know how to do it!!” One of the older ladies cracked Kelly and I up, because she would not listen to Alberto, OR Kenya, and she mixed all of her eggs and flour in all at once…not slowly…so Alberto had to work with her for quite a while to get her pasta dough just right!! LOL Alberto had put aside some of the pasta dough for what, we didn’t know, but wouldn’t you know it, Kenya got her hot little hands on it and started making a ton of different pastas again…hee hee…well, while she did that, we made our potato and bacon ravioli. Personally, I thought it was weird to stuff pasta with another starch like potatoes, but with the bacon in it, it was ok! Anyway, the day went quite fast, and we enjoyed our delicious meal quite immensely!



All of the other people in our group that day, were part of a week-long tour, and they decided they wanted to go into Florence that afternoon and evening, so Kenya and I decided that we would hitch a ride into the city. We were dropped off right in front of the oldest bridge in Florence…the Ponte Vecchio. Apparently, during World War II, every bridge in Florence was bombed, except for the Ponte Vecchio. These days the entire bridge houses many gold jewelry shops on it. The very first thing we did was go and buy some gelato!!! I don’t know how we did it, having just eaten our huge meal, but we managed!! We saw that there was a huge mass of Chinese tourists on the bridge, when we went up to take a closer look at the bridge, and something very peculiar happened…I was posing Kenya on the bridge to take a picture of her, when several Chinese people came up and wanted to take a picture with her! I mean they were VERY exuberant about it, like she was an international rock star or something! It completely cracked us up!! The guy kept saying “hi!...we from Chinese, we from Chinese!!!” We laughed and joked about it for the rest of our trip!!! Of course I had to take a picture of that!!



We walked through the city, and came upon this square that had a lot of statues. And there he was…the statue of David!!! I cannot tell you the feeling I had…he was so, absolutely beautiful, that he took your breath away!!! Kenya and I took a ton of photos of him and all of the rest of the statues in the square. We also got to see the Duomo, which looked a lot different in person…the marble was pastel colored! I hope my camera picked the images up ok!!



Anyway, we were walking through the street market, which was a shopper’s paradise, I might add, and there was this street hawker who was selling watercolor paintings of Florence…I must have looked interested because he kept following us and asking if I was interested in buying one. I might have, but I knew it would be hard to pack and keep it nice…so I pleasantly said “no, thank you”. Maybe I should have been more firm, because he “stalked” us for a good half hour…whenever I bought something at a stall, I asked Kenya if he was around…sure enough, he was right there behind us! I kinda felt bad, but oh well…we called him our stalker for the rest of the day!! Anyway, after perusing the street market, we came upon a kitchen store…so I thought I might go in and see how much a pasta machine would cost. We found one that was the same one we used in class, and I thought…what the heck…since Kenya had so much fun making pasta in class, it would be fun to keep doing it at home…so we bought it and several contraptions to make ravioli, etc. Since I knew it would not fit into our suitcase, I also bought a cloth shopping cart with wheels. And it served us very well the rest of the visit in the city that night! It was about 7:30 at that time, so we decided to eat dinner. We stopped at this darling trattoria/pizzeria, and we had crostini misti, which is a mixture of three different kinds of crostini on one plate…there was tomato bruscetta, an olive tapenade, and a chicken liver pate (yes, I tried it, and I really did not like it). Kenya ordered a diavolo pizza (pepperoni…if you ordered a ‘pepperoni pizza’, you’d get a pizza with peppers on it!), and I ordered a wild boar pasta dish (or cingale) made Tuscan style. Midway through the meal, we got a phone call from my mom and dad…they said “where are you?” We said “in Florence…in the city”. They said, “guess where we are?” They had actually arrived a day and a half early! They were going to surprise us, but we weren’t there! It turned out that it was absolutely freezing in Bavaria, where they had been visiting for a week, that they decided they needed to come to the warm Mediterranean early! We told them we would finish and take the train back as soon as possible. Luckily, the villas’ owner had been around that afternoon and let them into our villa. It was so nice to get off of the train and see them!!! We felt like we had been away from home so long at that point! They said they were not happy with the Italian driving! LOL! Unfortunately, it took them an hour and a half to just go twenty kilometers in Florence rush hour. But they loved our place and their room and we all went happily to sleep.

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