Cooking School!

Today we had a cooking lesson at the scuola di cucina next to my school at Fontabranda. The first awesome thing about the cooking school was that it was super warm inside, which is a big deal for Italy. It's always cold here, or at least it will be until the spring.

When we first got there they had us put on sweet aprons, which I have to say we looked pretty cool in.
The lesson began with papa di pomedoro, which is a tomato-y soup that's meant to use up old bread that's gone stale. Lella, the instructor (who luckily had a translator) told us that it's important to us tuscan bread, first because of the lack of salt thing, and second because it's a traditional Tuscan recipe so of COURSE you have to use Tuscan bread. We didn't actually get to do any of the work on this ourselves, but watching it was still cool.

Next we made pasta! The kind we made originated in Siena, it's called pici and is super thick. It was fun to make, but the pasta was a little to thick and doughy for me, I'm more of a thin pasta girl.
Last, for dessert we made cenci for dessert, which is a fried crispy dessert that's made for Carnavale season. That turned out to be really good.

I think the soup was my favorite, and the sauce on the pasta was good but we didn't help make that really.

Papa Pomedori!

Pici (di Siena)

Cenci (which literally translates to "rags")










After that we just had class, so it was pretty unexciting. At leas we got some cute pictures of us cooking though!