Cooking Rule... If at first you don't succeed, order pizza

Last night I had my first cooking class.  The class was on the roof top terrace on campus.  The teacher ‘s name was Chef Andrea Consoli and he owns and operates his own family restaurant.  Earlier that day he bought all of the ingredients fresh at the market for our meal.  The food was incredible and I learned how to make some new things.  The teacher is planning on emailing us the menu and directions again of what we made since it was so much and hard to remember.  The first course was bruschetta.  Bruschetta is toasted bread seasoned with garlic and olive oil, commonly served warm as an appetizer, snack, or side dish. The name comes from the Italian word bruscare, which means "to roast over coals." Many variations of bruschetta exist; adding tomatoes, other vegetables or beans is common.  The simplest form of bruschetta starts with Tuscan bread, toasted either over coals or in a toaster. Rub the toasted slices with a cut clove of garlic, and then drizzle with extra virgin olive oil. Then salt and pepper the prepared bruschetta. As a tradition, bruschetta serves to test the new harvest of olive oil each year.  The next course was chicken.  I learned how to take the bone out of a chicken and then what you call “butter flying it.”  We then sautéed it in a ton of butter and garlic.  After a little sautéing, we put a basil leaf and a piece of cheese on top and waited it for to melt. 

            The next course was hand made gnocchi.  Connoisseurs of fine Italian food know that gnocchi is a small dumpling. In fact, the word gnocchi in Italian means "lump". Gnocchi is most often made with potatoes, though it can also be made from flour, squash, cheese or even polenta. Gnocchi is served much in the same manner as pasta, with sauce or some butter and sage or parmesan cheese.  Gnocchi recipes date back to the twelfth century and are most common in the Northern regions of Italy. We had to skin the potatoes, then mash the potatoes, then roll the mashed potatoes up into like string cheese.  From there we cut individual pieces of gnocchi. 

            The dessert was nutella cookies.  He told us about the rumor of raw eggs and salmonella which makes sense considering I eat cookie dough all of the time and don’t get sick.  It is impossible to get salmonella from the raw egg itself.  The way to get salmonella is from eating a piece of the actual shell.  The dessert was basically a soft sugar cookie topped with nutella.  Nutella is extremely popular here.  It is basically their version of peanut butter.  They put it on everything from toast to fruit.  Kids at school eat nutella sandwiches for lunch.  Nutella is made from a chocolate called Gianduja which is a type of chocolate containing approximately 50% almond and hazelnut paste. It was developed in Piedmont, Italy, after taxes on cocoa beans hindered the diffusion of conventional chocolate.  The exact recipe is a secret closely guarded by Ferrero. According to the product label, the main ingredients of Nutella are sugar and vegetable oils, followed by hazelnut, cocoa solids and skimmed milk, which together comprise at most 29% of the ingredients. Nutella is marketed as "hazelnut cream" in many countries. Under Italian law, it cannot be labeled as a chocolate cream, as it does not meet minimum cocoa solids concentration criteria.

            After the lesson at about 10 I walked home with one of my suite mates Marni.  When we got home my whole house was getting ready to go out so I jumped on board.  I put on a dress and did my make-up.  In all there were about 15 of us.  We called three taxis and went to this bar called Kara Kara.  It wasn’t very crowded but it was fun knowing everyone there.  On the way home the taxi driver tried to rip us off by taking a round about way home.  Luckily we are starting to get our grounding pretty well so we called him out on it!  He was embarrassed and we didn’t pay him the entire taxi fee when we go out because he was trying to take advantage of us and take the scenic route home so he would get more money.  I have class today at 2:15 and I usually don’t have school on Fridays but I have a make-up day this Friday because we get school off for Halloween. In the pictures below the first one is Marni and the second one is my room mate Tara taken from last night.