the art of cooking

February 10th, 2011

 

So now that I live on my own... I have to cook for myself.  As pathetic as this sounds, that is a bit of a shock for me.  Not only have I always had the luxury of a homemade meal prepared for my by my parents every night, I am also highly unskilled in the kitchen.  It was starting to look like I would be eating pasta and bread for the next three months.  Distraught by this notion, my roommates and I signed up for a cooking class in which we prepared a three course meal.  We met with the group and trekked to this unassuming little hole in the wall kitchen.  It was deep in the side streets of Florence, and it would have been easy to miss as the door lacked any sign of what takes place behind it.

We started off by making a dessert called "chocolate salami"- and it looked just as it sounds.  We crushed up gram crackers, added some cocoa, sugar, butter rolled it together and put it in the fridge.  Then we began preparing the starter, eggplant mozzarella. We cut up some eggplant, sauteed it, then cut up slices of fresh mozzarella and tomatoes and put it in the oven.  For the main dish, we made homemade gnocchi.  I was in charge of pulverizing the boiled potatoes which was no easy task.  After the potatoes were all cut up we added flour, egg yoke and a few other ingredients mixed in.  The chefs who were teaching us were very particular about how we rolled the gnocchi's and he called ours "American gnocchi" because they were too big... and ugly.

After we finished preparing our meal we sat down and enjoyed it!   

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 Everything was so delicious!  We cleared the plate!  Hopefully I picked up on a few things because I'm making dinner tonight.. that should be interesting...