2018 Italy Vacation, Day 12: Kathi's Cooking Class

The Cinque Terre Cooking School in Monterosso al Mare was so wonderful!  Kevin encouraged me to go, so we made a last-minute reservation online, and used PayPal to pay for the deposit (50%) for the class ahead of time.  The instructions were to meet at a particular spot a few blocks from the Monterosso train station, so I left early to be sure I had plenty of time to find my way.  It was an easy walk of about 15 minutes from the station, and the meeting point ended up being at a traffic roundabout, which felt a little bit awkward, but turned out to be a good way to break the ice with my fellow students, as we were all randomly standing at a traffic circle on a Wednesday morning!  We introduced ourselves, and I was the only single attendee — the other couples were from Texas, Florida, California, and Toronto. 

Not long after we assembled, a small bus/van came to pick us up.  We were a larger than normal group, so we had to squish a little bit in the van, which furthered us along in our bonding process!  

We headed around the side of the hills up to the school, which was at a local restaurant/hotel.  When we arrived there, it was breathtakingly beautiful.  The scenery was gorgeous, and the outdoor kitchen prep area was so pretty.  There was a large wooden table set up so that each couple would be working directly across from each other at the table, with one smaller table stuck on the very end for me! This worked out to be a real benefit though, because since I was alone, the chef became my partner!

Our chef introduced himself, and told us what the menu was going to be: stuffed vegetables, gnocchi with traditional Ligurian pesto sauce, Sea bass with roasted olives and tomatoes, and a limoncello fruitcake.  

The day's ingredients were lain out before us...

Lovely zucchini blossoms like my grandmother used to use.

The tools of the trade...

 Our work table...

 The first thing we did was to get started on the cake, so it could bake while we were making the rest of our items.  

Flour, candied fruit, spice and limoncello!

In addition to the main ingredients, we were each given a small glass of limoncello and told that we could drink however much we didn’t want to add to the cake!  This set a precedent, as each course we prepared came with some accompanying alcohol component, which also helped to keep us all happy and enjoying ourselves.  Doing shots of limoncello at 10 o’clock in the morning was a new experience for me, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy!

The cake came together by incorporating a few eggs into a pile of flour shaped like a well.  

 We cracked the eggs into the well, and gradually mixed the flour in with our hands. Then we added some spices, candied fruit and of course, the limoncello!  

 We shaped them into rounds, placed them in disposable aluminum pans, covered them with powdered sugar and sent them off to the kitchen to bake. 

We continued on making a tray of roasted potatoes, which would be served with the fish, setting a few potatoes on to boil for our gnocchi.  

 

Once that was done, we started on to the stuffed vegetables.  This was a recipe that I had never seen before, nor did I know was traditional to this area, but it is the one that I have probably enjoyed best of all the things I learned to cook that day, and have made many times since we returned home.  It was really easy and tasty, and easily modified to suit different ingredients.  We used zucchini, peppers, and red onion.  

 

 We hollowed out the vegetables, and stuffed them with a mixture of the insides of the other vegetables, milk, torn pieces of bread, cheese, herbs, and ham.

 

 

 While we prepared this course, we had a beautiful local red wine.  

Next, we tackled the gnocchi.  I had been thrilled when we first arrived at the cooking school to see that the mortar and pestle that I had bought the day before in Levanto was the exact one that we were going to be using to make our pesto.  


We began by pulling the leaves from bunches of basil.  We worked together to do this, and it is really important not to have any stems mixed in with the leaves, because the stems are very difficult to pulverize using the mortar and pestle. 

The basil leaves, pine nuts, a clove of garlic

 Grinding is a labor of love...

 ...and hard work!

Making a large quantity of pesto using a mortar and pestle is really a lot of work, but luckily for me, the chef was there to help me.  Not to mention I was on my third glass of wine by this point so I was not operating at optimal levels!

Once we finished the basil, we added garlic and pine nuts to the mortar and used the pestle to grind them down to a fine paste, adding olive oil to get the right consistency. 

We set our pesto aside and got to work making the gnocchi.  

 The chef retrieved the boiling potatoes from the water, had us peel them after they cooled for a minute or two and mashed them with a fork.

Then we added eggs and a mixture of semolina and fine white flour and mixed until we had a smooth dough.

 We then were each given a small piece of dough to roll into a long snake shape, then cut into small pieces to form the gnocchi.

  Rolling and cutting the bite-sized gnocchi...

 The chef came around with trays for us to place are finished pasta on, sprinkling it with a little semolina to help keep them from sticking together too much.  We set them aside until we were ready to cook them.

Next was the fish course - sea bass.  

This was my first time filleting a fish, and it was a lot easier than I thought it’d be.  We added the two fillets, skin side down, to an aluminum pan with a little olive oil on it.  

 

 Then we topped each fillet with sliced cherry tomatoes, black olives, and sliced almonds.  We added salt, pepper, and herbs, and sprinkled with a little more olive oil.  The fish was sent back to the restaurant oven to broil.   

Potatoes, to accompany the sea bass, were sliced and broiled in olive oil. 

 We boiled the gnocchi, which floated to the top when cooked, then scooped them from the cooking water and added them directly to our bowls of pesto.  

 

 The rest of the food was brought out from the kitchen, and we headed over to a beautifully set table to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

 A little snack the chef whipped up...

 Our meal is complete....

 Needless to say, there was more wine, and after the meal, we finished with an aperetivo, either limoncello or homemade grappa, complete with the grapes still in the glass.  It was powerful stuff!

We ended our day with a group photo.  

It was such a wonderful experience, and not something I would have ever imagined doing on my own. Each of the students and the staff made me feel so welcomed and comfortable, though, that I had a wonderful time.  Not only that, I had plenty of food to bring back and share with Kevin — the chef kindly wrapped it all for me to bring back.  

I took the train back to Vernazza, and met Kevin near our hotel, and he ate every bite with gusto!