Day 24

This morning I have my fourth Latin cuisine class. We are moving on to South American Cuisine today and the menu is ok. It does however have one of my least favorite ingredients, hearts of palm. I think they are disgusting personally and we were going to have to make a hearts of palm soup. However I said right away to my class that I wanted to do it, because I like making good soups and I wanted to see if I could accomplish it with something I hate. Fortunately or unfortunately we couldn't find hearts of palm in Italy. Oh well, darn. Instead we got a recipe for posole, a hominy and pork stew. I spent a full 4 hours just simmering it and working on it. It ended up being great, but I found that hominy is really hard to get fully cooked, it still wasn't after all that time. The rest of the menu was good as well, chicken roasted in a great sauce, crepes filled with apples and covered with a dulce de leche sauce, a tomato and onion salad, and swiss chard. It was a great lunch. Shortly afterwards our entire class got to stay around for Italian cuisine class. This is the group wide Italian cooking class that is part of our study abroad trip, its not part of my European cuisine class. The class focuses on Umbrian cuisine where we are staying and once we complete the course we will all get certificates from the Umbrian government. Tonight's menu was some roast chickens stuffed with prunes and herbs, something that the restaurant does all the time. We also had some potato flans that I made, some fresh pasta with a shrimp and cream sauce, and some pear gelato for desert that was excellent as awesome. It was an awesome class really. We cleaned up after dinner and were able to go home. It was really a long day. I don't mind so much being at the restaurant all day if I'm working some internship hours, but two cooking classes in one day wears you out. So as usual I am just off to bed after class, I need some sleep and we have another group trip out of town tomorrow and the bus leaves at 8.