Cucina 101

On Saturday Elettra offered a cooking class. Upon our arrival everything was set up and ready to go including all the necessary Italian vocabulary written on the dry erase board seen in the photo below.

Our menu was:

Antipasti: Melanzane (eggplant) alla parmigiana and Ribolitta, a traditional Florentine soup

Preparing the Melanzane alla Parmigiana

Preparing the Ribolitta

Rolling out the Pici

Primo Piatto: 

Pici cacio e pepe, 

Pici is a traditional Senese pasta, similar to a very thick spaghetti, made with flour, water and a little oil. The cooked pici is folded into a sauce of melted Pecorino cheese then seasoned with pepper. Pecorino cheese is a local traditional cheese made from sheep's milk.

Peorino Cheese

We could definitely tell the difference between Elettra's pici and ours.

Cooking the Pici and melting the Pecorino cheese

The end result was a very rotund pici al dente.

Italians serve each dish separately. You will never see a side dish served on the same plate as a main dish. And they never serve bread with pasta. 

Contorno: Insalata di finocchi alla Siciliana.

Italian cuisine, in some ways, is very simple. They do not cook with several different spices and ingredients in the same dish, yet the results are amazingly delicious.

Our final preparation was  Dolce: Panna cotta alle fragole - a light custard-like dessert (cooked cream) covered with fresh crushed strawberries.
Afterward we sat down and enjoyed the meal together. It was buonissimo!