Day 12

This morning I had Italian cooking part 3. I woke up feeling better, but I think I am getting a cold which sucks. We got to the restaurant at 8 and as soon as we arrived we were off to the Saturday farmer's market to pick up what we needed for the day. That is an awesome thing to do. Just a 10 minute walk away you can pick up the freshest ingredients you can imagine. Today's menu includes ravioli, pesto, chicken with peppers, stuffed zucchini blossoms, chickpea bread, and risotto. I took the ravioli for myself because I want to make as much fresh pasta as I can while I am here. Our filling today is fresh brocollini that we picked up at market along with basil, ricotta cheese, and hot pepper oil. I started out making the pasta dough, by hand of course. Its time consuming, especially if you are doing enough to feed 20 people, but it's amazing to watch the Chef or some of his workers do it, because it becomes so fast and perfect with practice. After I had the filling done and the pasta had rested we started to roll it out. Out of one mass of dough we would split it into 4 parts and 3 of us would work on rolling it out and making the raviolis to save some time. Getting the pasta to just the right thickness takes patience and practice. You want it thin enough to see through it. By the time you are done, hopefully, you have a large flat piece that is near enough square or at least round. One half you use a melon baller to portion out your filling, the other half you brush with egg wash and then fold it over the filling carefully, making sure to not tear the delicate pasta and make sure you get as much air out of the pockets of filling as you can. We had more success than failure with it so we were happy. Our goal was to just make enough where everyone could have 4 raviolis, a perfect portion, we had more than enough for that. The initial plan was to serve it with the fresh pesto, but after we made them we decided the pesto would be too much and cover the flavor of our filling so we would instead boil the ravioli and then finish them in a saute pan with sage butter and parmesan. It took me about 3 hours with plenty of help to make those raviolis. We all had lunch ready on time, 1 pm. We plated up a family style lunch for all of us. It was all great. The risotto ended up with tons of black truffles and cheese, it was very well seasoned. The chicken was so good, especially since it is almost rare to see chicken served around here, the sauce though was too good to leave on the plate, you had to take the Chef's advice and clean it off with a piece of bread. After lunch we cleaned up and had our first lesson with a sommelier. My initial plan was to not drink of it and just spit it out, then they told me that it was all at least 80 euros a bottle so I should drink it or else its just going down a drain. Don't get me wrong, they were all really good wines. I made sure to take pictures of all the labels so I could find them in the future. Some of our group ended up a bit tipsy, but you could tell everyone really enjoyed this kind of class for some reason. Afterwards, I went home for a quick nap and then some homework before dinner. Dinner tonight included cannolis for dessert, a barley soup with sausages, whole roasted trout, and some Italian creamed potatoes. The potatoes were excellent, although they weren't really a recipe from the Chef, it was just one of our group members creations. The trout was also perfect, especially topped with a bit of the pesto we made this morning that hadn't been used. Another great dinner and then it was back home for some more homework. I am trying to get ahead for the next week and tomorrow I have my first Latin cuisine class.