The kitchens of Tuscany
Submitted by:
Probono_new
From:
United States of America
Publication date: February 15, 2007
Having always loved Italian cooking, I enrolled one summer in a cooking school in Tuscany, just outside of Florence. The scenery was straight out of a movie set. The sample recipes outlined in the brochures advised that the school only used fresh, seasonal ingredients. No chemicals were used on the herb gardens, olive trees, or vineyards at the cooking school. The first day of learning how to make ravioli was very hands-on. We mixed the special 'pasta' eggs with the durum flour with our hands. We used a 'hand-cranked' pasta machine to create long strips of thin dough, about 3 feet (1 metre) long. One of us would crank out the dough. Another would lay the dough out on the table. While a third person would pipe in the filling. It was such a sense of accomplishment when we finished. Everyone was passing around high-fives as the chefs gave us marks on all our creations. We were so elated that we forgot that the ravioli was only 1 course out of 5 that we had to prepare. But by that time, we were all good friends and exchanging stories about home and family. At the end of the week, we all took each others' addresses and e-mails. Not only did my family love the new cooking, but I made some new wonderful friends in the process.
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