Adventures in Cooking - Part I

This morning I faced my fear of inadequacy and went to the dark place where I am most inept in life: The Kitchen. The cooking class is held at a restaurant called Antica Osteria just a short while from the hotel in the town of Scalea. When we arrived, we were met by our chef, Genaro, and a translator named Christiano and a photographer named Carmine. While they were setting up, I had a cappuccino and a mom had a “caffe.” I had explained to her yesterday that a coffee here means a shot of espresso, but she’d forgotten and thought the tiny cup was hysterical (musing that my dad would need about 20 of these) and made several faces after tasting it.

Now to the kitchen. We started with our appetizer. I was given the task of peeling potatoes, and mom, cutting the peppers. Mom was a pro and was tossing peppers around and hamming it up for the camera in the time it took me to peel two potatoes. Soon she started to help me, thankfully, so we could move on to the first course. I found that while peeling potatoes was a weakness of mine, stirring them in a frying pan was a strength. Unfortunately I couldn’t do that for long, but the more time-consuming task of making gnocchi kept me busy for a good while. I especially enjoyed the little contraption that looked like a Play-doh fun factory. Once we made the dough, rolling it and slicing it kept me busy while mom cut the meat for our second course. The sauce for the gnocchi was an olive oil based mushroom, sausage, tomato and garlic sauce. The second course was a simple meat, carrots and celery with white wine sauce. We then did an after-meal course of tomato with a gratin of anchovies, capers, bread crumbs, garlic and parsley. The bread crumb maker was another cool contraption.

Now it was time to eat our masterpiece and neither mom nor I had the appetite to eat the whole thing, so by the time the second course came, we were really just tasting it as the chef lovingly yelled at us in Italian, reminding me that I’m eating for two, and making hand gestures of a microscope. Stuffed, we were able to relax for about an hour before our excursion to the town of Diamante.



Diamante is a town known for its murals. Apparently in 1981 an artist came to the town, once just a small fishing village, and talked the mayor into letting 180 artists come and paint murals all over the buildings. Much of the countryside we passed between the airport and here was made up of abandoned towns because there is no agriculture or any need for people to inhabit some of this land. But apparently the artwork revitalized the town and brought with it a tourism industry. Carmine walked us through the town explaining the murals while Christiano translated. They then took us for some gelatto before returning to the hotel. Now we are just trying to work up enough appetite to go back to the restaurant for dinner (which apparently they didn’t think we ate enough last night.) This has been an amazing trip so far and it’s only our first real day of the course. Tomorrow is a non-cook day and we are going to a museum of regional foods.