Florence, Italy: Digging In

I’ve finally decided something – I’m digging in. I’m going to stay in Florence for most weekends and enjoy the culture. Several people have told me I need to go to several places, but I realized today that I haven’t enjoyed Florence enough. I’ve yet to go into the Uffizi, the Museum of San Marco, the Accademia or the Duomo. I’ve lived here for almost six weeks now and I’ve yet to see what most consider the top four cultural gems of Florence. I’ve also noticed that I do worse academically after I am away for the weekend than when I’m here and studying (even if only for a short time). I had the same situation at TCU; after any retreats I helped with I usually bombed the tests on the following Mondays. So I’m going to dig in and enjoy my time here in my new city.

Know what else I’m digging in to? Food. Great food! I wrote about my first cooking class two weeks ago, but it’s only become better. We had another class this past Wednesday at the Culinary Institute. All of us left that class knowing we’d learned some treasures. First plate: Linguine al Limone. The lemon sauce melted in with the linguine was great. it was made from butter, parsley, parmesan cheese and lemon zest as well as some pine nuts. Then came the second plate, which was what I worked on: sweet peppers, tomatoes and eggplants cooked with stuffing inside of them. This stuffing had capers, anchovies, raisins, nuts, parsley and bread crumbs. You may say it sounds disgusting (that’s what I thought when I first heard it), but it didn’t disappoint. I don’t normally like half of the things on that list, but the combination brought out the best parts of all of them. After that we each got two different types of panna cotta, one with chocolate and one with berries. Panna cotta, for those who don’t know, is cream, sugar, jello all mixed together with vanilla bean.

I’m not going to keep adding adjectives to all of these descriptions because I’m not a poet. My phrase that I overuse but still applies to this is “it’s all good”.

Tonight, I did something even better than the cooking classes at the institute: private lessons at a student’s apartment. Michael, one of the institute’s student assistants, gives private lessons at his apartment on Saturdays. 10 euros and he teaches us to make all of the food and then we get to devour it. Plus, he does all of the shopping and has all of the equipment. I did the lessons with two girls from the San Francisco group also studying here and it was a blast. He takes lets us pick what we want to learn, so my request was lasagna. He didn’t teach me to make lasagna; it was so much better than any lasagna I’ve ever had. Earlier this week I wrote about the lasagna at my favorite restaurant, but this topped it … by far! We did everything in it from scratch (save for the pasta sheets for the noodles — but I know how to make those!). He taught us how to make the ragu (tomato sauce with veggies, meat and wine) and the bechamel, which is a cream sauce that takes away the need for internal cheese. You may be asking, “how can a lasagna be that good without cheese?” I guess you caught me, there are layers of parmesan cheese, but the cream sauce makes it a minor detail. We also made saltimbocca, which is chicken breasts with ham and sage in a butter and white wine sauce. Then he taught us his specialty (I’m kind of surprised he gave the secret out that willingly): molten lava cakes. These dark chocolate cakes are baked on the outside but have melted chocolate on the inside that comes pouring out when you cut into them. Plus, it’s topped with powdered sugar and is sitting on a layer of cocoa powder on the plate. I won’t put an adjective with those, since one of the girls came up with a better name: “Molten Miracles.” It’s probably not a good idea to demean miracles that much, but it was so good I’ll do it this once (and any other time I make them!). Digging into Florence – digging into my cooking. Who knew that digging could be so much fun?!?