Day 4

Today was the second day of our Italian cuisine courses. I am in the morning group so we started out at the restaurant at 7 am. Today's menu was gnocchi with a lamb ragu, eggplant parmigiana, chocolate and cinnamon gellato, a cornmeal pie with raisins and mushrooms, and a ricotta cheese and chocolate pie. I helped with the eggplant parmigiana. I started with a simple tomato sauce, fried eggplant slices, and Chef made a bechamel. We ended up plating it in individual ramekins, by lining the bottom of the ramekins with thinly sliced zucchini and layering the ingredients inside with pecorino and parmesan. It turned out very good. We also made fresh pizza today, some with tomato and red onion and another with tomato and mozzarella. The pizza was great. The gnocchi with the lamb ragu was definitely my favorite though. The gnocchi was a simple recipe with some fennel fronds for color. We made a massive amount of the dough so it took a very long time for 4 people to roll it all out. All of these recipes are definitely keepers. It was a very good lunch. Afterwards the morning group had a break until we needed to be back for dinner and tonight is our first Italian language class. During break some us wandered the city as usual, others just relaxed until dinner. Of course by the time 6 pm rolled around a lot of us were hungry but we had to have language class before dinner at 8. The class was interesting. We learned by doing for some of it because we had to fill out some personal information because we are getting certification from the Umbrian Government for language training. Then we started out with basic greetings and numbers. I believe we are getting at least 20 hours of instruction over the course of our stay here. Dinner was great once again, but too much. We waste a lot of great food because there are at least 3 courses and the serving size is large. Tonight there were 4 courses. The first was a spring bread salad, with veggies, spaghetti with a mushroom cream sauce, and beef bocconcini, with a ricotta and chesnut mousse with a red wine reduction for dessert. After dinner we went out together again and just relaxed but a lot of us took off for home early since we have another tour tomorrow at 8 am.