Buon Appetito: Eating and Cooking through Rome and Florence

Ciao!

Mom and I just got back from a trip to Italy, and I am already planning my next trip back. This was my first time in Italy, so we just hit up the biggies: Rome and Florence. I loved them both, for different reasons, and would return in a heartbeat... If only I could afford it!

If you must know, I am guilty of taking pictures of pretty much every item of food that I consumed, but since stuff like that is documented far and wide across the Internet, I thought I'd just write a short post about one of the most fun activities we did on the trip: a cooking class in Florence at Giglio Cooking School. Marcella, the woman who runs this school, is a treasure -- she's knowledgable, patient, and refreshingly laid back.

We made spinach ravioli stuffed with asparagus and scampi, truffle risotto, and a pine nut cake. My hands were dirty with pasta dough, shrimp, and cake batter for most of the evening, so I don't have pictures of everything, but here is one of my favorites.

I had never made pasta from scratch, and I got a kick out of the fact that you don't need any sort of bowl -- you just make a bowl out of flour and dump the egg right in the middle! 

We also made black truffle risotto, but unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of that dish. You'll have to take my word that it was rich and utterly delicious. Definitely not for the everyday mean, but a decadent, savory treat to be sure. 

For dessert, we baked pine nut cake with red wine caramel sauce. AMAZING. I've actually never made caramel sauce either, because caramel is usually too sweet for my tastes. On the contrary, this sauce was absolutely divine -- with all of the alcohol burned off, you could savor the flavor of the wine grapes. It almost tasted berry-like, but without all those pesky seeds! I know I'll make this again.

At the end of the night, Marcella sent us home with half of the leftover cake (which I kept eating for days), and two jars of fig jam and honey, which came from her friend Max's farm in the countryside. How thoughtful! I would recommend Giglio Cooking School and Marcella to anyone traveling through Florence. The evening was one of the highlights of my trip!

Unfinished Business: Homemade Blueberry Pop Tarts

Sigh... I don't know how this happened. I'm usually pretty good about remembering to take pictures of final products, but somehow this time it completely slipped my mind. They were really tasty, though, so I felt like sharing the pictures anyway, however incomplete the story may be...

There is a story behind these blueberry pop tarts, by the way, and the story goes something like this.

Sara walked into her favorite natural grocery store, which starts with a "W" and ends with "oods", and discovered that organic blueberries were $1.99 per pint, one day only. So pleased with this fortuitous discovery, Sara placed two boxes in her basket. 

She then proceeded to pick up a few other items -- celery, baby carrots, tofu -- but she couldn't shake the nagging sense that she had bypassed a real gem of an opportunity. She went back and picked up another box of blueberries. Now, to the butcher for some bone-in chicken breasts! 

Ah, but the berries called her again. After all, Sara had been known to eat a whole pint of blues in one sitting, so there was simply no way that three boxes would suffice. Two more, into the fray.

And that, my dear friends, is how I ended up with five pints of blueberries. You can't possibly imagine my delight. I even went so far as to text Dad to tell him about my great steal -- he went to WF the same day, up in Northern California, and bought three boxes for himself. Like father, like daughter.

Now, if I'm being perfectly honest (which I always am on this blog), I ate 3.5 of the boxes straight up. But I saved some for these pop tarts, because blueberry pie is my #1 all-time favorite, and these are just like handheld pies. I've detailed the pop tarts recipe at length on this blog, so I won't go into that, but suffice it to say that blueberries + sugar + lemon zest + pastry = the pinnacle of happiness.