Italian cooking course

As a birthday present to myself, I started today a course at the Italian Centre in Playa. The course runs for 4 days for a total of 9 hours, and we started with handmade pasta. A great opportunity to get up to my elbows in flour (wearing black was NOT a good idea) and learn how it’s done from the basics.

There were 3 of us doing the course, a Mexican girl, a Spanish girl and moi from Aus, and our teacher Adriana from Udine in the north of Italy. Today we made lasagne first - starting with the bolognaise sauce. She showed us how to use the knives, how small to cut the vegetables, how to smash the garlic clove to peel it. After frying the veges we added the meat - ½ pork and ½ beef mince, and then tomato concentrate and the various spices. Although it was only 10 in the morning, my stomach was already growling with the wonderful smells! We left the sauce to stew, and moved onto the béchamel, a different way to how I have always done it, but it came out smooth and very creamy.

Then it was time to start working the dough and after several passes through the pasta machine it was so thin that it didn’t need cooking before assembling the whole lot and into the oven.

We started then on the pappardelle, a thicker pasta cut by hand or with a little wheel contraption, and left them to dry while we made a Salsa di pomodoro. The pasta took only about 5 minutes to cook and then we tossed it through the sauce and took out first mouthful - ahhh!

By then, the lasagne was cooked and what a wonderful fragrant dish emerged bubbling and golden from the oven, and how ambrosial it smelt!

We took both the dishes home, just in time for lunch! I stopped at the supermarket for some fresh bread rolls. I’ve only tasted the pappardelle so far, the lasagne will be dinner tonight.

The course cost about $90 for the 4 days, including the ingredients and 2 dishes to bring home each time. I think I’ll be lucky to get through all this food myself as the class runs every 2^nd day, and may have to freeze some. Next time we are hand making ravioli! After this, I can continue with the same format for main courses and then desserts, by which time they might need a crane to get me up the steps to mi casa!