Posted by fum on Monday, May 22, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

Italy is the ideal place to take a cooking class; I love pasta, pizza, basically any type of Italian food ever. So I was over the moon when I learned that we were going up into the mountains to take a cooking class and simultaneously cook a lovely Italian dinner for ourselves. It was quite difficult to reach the home of the man teaching us how to cook. The bus had to navigate all the twists and turns through the mountains, and once the roads became too small we had to walk to reach our final destination.

Once we reached the somewhat-isolated house, I understood why our teacher, Nino, chose to live there. He had his own garden where he grew fresh fruits and vegetables that he used in his meals. His house was very simplistic, styled in a Japanese fashion with a beautiful open kitchen. We first watched him make a broth from scratch, explaining each step as he went. The broth was used to cook the rice which would eventually be formed into arancini, a Sicilian specialty that is essentially a stuffed fried rice ball. We all got to be involved in forming the balls and filling them with eggplant or meat, along with two different kinds of cheese. I noticed that cooking in Italy is intended to be shared among people, where everybody is contributing to the process. Instead of being a chore, it’s a time to bond with the people around you as you prepare a delicious meal to share. In America, cooking is seen as more of a chore, and American dishes are more individualized while Italian dishes are meant to be shared. Italian meals are actually very similar to traditional Chinese meals, where all the dishes are meant to be split and the process of preparing the food is a bonding experience.

Since there were so many of us and Nino was highly underprepared for so many people, he ended up making the rest of the meal himself, with some help from his family. He made a delicious pasta for our first course, followed by sausage wrapped in sage leaves, and finishing with a delicious desert that was essentially a crepe filled with cannoli filling. I’ve found that Italian antipasti, or appetizers, are a lot heavier than traditional American appetizers, such as the arancini. But, as is typical of Italian meals, our meal took at least 6 hours as we sat around and chatted and attempted to help Nino cook. In the end, not much cooking was done by us, but we got to enjoy a real Italian meal and each other’s company in the mountains of Sicily and that was the true experience.

Our master chef, Nino: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0f8fj2A_7mqSFA0VlFVSG9sZ0U/view?usp=sharing

The arancini that we made, about to be cooked: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0f8fj2A_7mqWVhUbGpHcXJhX00/view?usp=sharing