Cooking at a Fattoria

I've received a few e-mails asking where the food posts are.  Too be honest, food hasn't really been as big of a thing as one might think.  Aside from the addiction ritual of stopping in for 2-3 caffe macchiatos every day, food is a spur of the moment decision to be made only when actual hunger pains strike.  

First of course,  there's the daily shopping and storage issue.  The second half of that is that a lot of recipes require a full pantry of ingredients I am not interested in purchasing and then purging.  Eating out and takeout has been the norm and many other meals have consisted of picking up fresh pasta and a bit of sauce (at a small mom and pop shop that sells nothing else) to throw together at the house, grabbing a panini or pizza on the go, or more frequently, eating caprese salads.  I am the queen of caprese salads and most likely,  have eaten my weight in tomatoes already.  

When in Italy though, one must learn to make pasta right?  It's on my list of goals.  I've made pasta at home, but I really needed an Italian to show and guide me through the steps, the texture of the dough and the right steps for rolling it out--just in case Food Network is lying. 

I'm studying italian at Lucca Italian School and they have optional activities 3-4 times a week after classes.  This week's cooking demo was at a vineyard, Fattoria Sardi Giustiniani, just a bit outside of the city center.  We spent the afternoon touring, cooking and eating our wholly Tuscan meal.  

The only people more lucky than the owners of a Fattoria are those two rockstars living on a cliff above the waters in Cinque Terre.  

On the menu: Eggplant stacks, vegetable lasagna, chicken cacciatore and biscotti made with vin santo. 

Really, it starts out all about the wine.

Our  teacher Eva walked us through the essentials of making pasta...apparently it's about using two types of flour: all purpose and semolina.

On a side note, Eva spoke only Italian.  We had a translator there but I understood quite a bit of what she was saying. It helps that Italians use a lot of motions with their words.

I've always been pretty afraid of adding too much flour or working the dough too much--turns out pasta dough is pretty tough stuff.  

The kitchen smells were unbelievable.  Instead of browning the chicken in straight olive oil, we browned it in hot oil that had huge handfuls of rosemary, sage and garlic in it.  Why have I never thought of this genius technique?

The chicken was seriously crazy delicious. Since the recipes were from a class, I won't share them but definitely looking forward to mixing this one up when I get home. 

Quite the life to spend the days lazing about on an empty wine barrel in the warm Italian sun. 

The light was perfect and beautiful at sunset but so fleeting as light usually is.  By the time I wiped all of those fingerprints off the glass, I'd lost the sunbeam.  :(  I'll have to drink more wine and keep trying.