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!

On getting an MBA... or a Masters in Baking A-lot

Welcome to my sugary new blog! 


My name is Sara, and I just started my first year of business school at UCLA. In two years I will (hopefully) graduate with two MBAs: a Masters in Business Administration and a Masters in Baking A-lot. The second one is a made-up degree, so please excuse the incorrect grammar and the fact that "a-lot" is neither a word nor an appropriate use of a hyphen. (I used to work in communications, so while this glaring error does send a shiver down my spine, I am also ever so pleased with my clever new acronym, so you're going to have to roll with me.)


Here's my plan: my goal is to bake something (anything!) and blog about it at least once a week. I may throw in some anecdotes from life/school, but only if they're funny (to me). And I'll try to include pictures. I don't have a great camera like a lot of the awesome food bloggers out there, but I do have a trusty little "point and shoot" that served me well through four years of college and four years of working. That's just a long way of saying that I'm on a student budget and can't buy a new camera. I also have a rather terrible phone camera, which may or may not be making cameo appearances here at The Opportunity Cost of Baking.


So, what's with the title, right? I call this blog The Opportunity Cost of Baking for two reasons. Firstly, I want you to be aware that I will, with 99.7% confidence, be making nerdy economics/statistics/academics jokes. It's just part of who I am. Secondly, at some point over the course of the next two years, you may ask yourself, "Does Sara ever study? It seems like all she does is bake and eat cookies." You will be correct in this observation. Life (and economics) is all about trade-offs, and for me, the opportunity cost of incessant baking will be foregone studies. It's a classic economic example, really -- right up there with widget factories and the Nash equilibrium.