Cooking School Splurge!
April 4 - 6
The Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School was to be my big splurge. When I planned this trip, it amazed me at how inexpensive lodging would be – and I figured the food would be cheaper (and definitely better) than what it costs us in the US. So, a $1500 venture for 3 ½ days was a pretty big splurge indeed!
Before I left, most everyone asked me if I would be taking any cooking lessons while I was in Sicily. Truth be told, I’m not sure I need them, as I really like the way I cook now. But heck, a few days at a school was bound to teach me something! I particularly liked that this one was founded by a well known “home cook” in Sicily. Anna Tasca passed away a few years back, but her daughter Fabrizia runs the school now. It’s based in the hills outside of Palermo in a town called Vallelunga Pratenema – but actually a bit outside of town on one of the family’s many vineyards. The Tasca Family is a pretty big deal in Sicily.
Check them out at http://www.tascadalmerita.it/en/ if you’re interested.
Tasca D’Almerita is their original vineyard and happens to be Fabrizia’s grandparents country home – and from what I hear, it’s a VERY grand home even today. It’s used by the family for vacations, but it’s also a 4-star resort that hosts wine aficionados from around the world. Fabrizia restored one of the old farm houses on the property and has built a pretty grand place for herself . . full of beautiful gardens, a commercial kitchen, her villa, apartments & guest rooms! I took a lot of pictures of her gorgeous smelling garden which is full of special spots for relaxing, yoga, swimming & sunning . . the picture with the hammock that I posted last week actually has been my favorite meditation spot of the trip thus far.
I arrive after a 3+ hour drive - should have been 1 ½ hours - but the damn GPS put me back on that road full of construction that we’d taken to Palermo a couple of days earlier & I couldn’t turn around. No worries, it feels like I’ve found my nirvana! I love this place . . it’s the little farm that I’ve always wanted. Then again, maybe the one I thought I wanted – because boy does this place look like a lot of work (and Fabrizia’s got quite a large team to run it!).
I’m shown to my lovely room in the main villa (I was downstairs in Fabrizia’s house) and am told class won’t start for about an hour. There’s still breakfast left in the kitchen, so I go in and have some tea & a slice of delicious lemon cake. Chef Michael comes in & introduces himself and asks if I’m Renee? “No, I’m Kari”. Oh, you’re the one that didn’t make it down last night. Yep, that’s me! So to start, Chef Michael is Irish – and he’s spent the last 10 years in Sicily (yes, he fell in love with a Sicilian woman & they have a 2 ½ year old son – but according to Michael, he would have stayed anyway). He speaks beautiful Italian, but it is funny that he has this little Irish lilt when he speaks it and his Irish is a little “polluted” with his Italian. All good! He & Fabrizia have this wonderful comraderie (she tells me later, she’s getting up there in years and thinks she’s found the right person to take over in Michael) but Michael does have this little playful “not following all of Fabrizia’s traditions” thing when she’s not looking. Seems he’s quite opinionated and doesn’t agree entirely with some of the cooking traditions of these locals (Fabrizia has these 2 woman that are the prep & sback-up cooks that were raised in this region & they don’t speak any Italian – but they are also opinionated & very bossy about how things should be done). All in all – quite entertaining environment to observe!
The rest of the students start to arrive and there will be just 6 of us. First up, this guy named Chris. He’s from Seattle, works for UW Medicine and is traveling through Europe on his own for 5 weeks. Then these 2 couples – Renee & Dan and Jeremy & Meredith. Dan’s really friendly and the self-appointed ambassador of the group, as far as I can tell. I keep looking at Renee and she just looks really familiar. I go up to her and ask, “are you a chef”? She says, “yes” and I ask if she’s been on any of the cooking competitions because she looks really familiar and she says, “yes, but Jeremy & I own 4 restaurants in Seattle”. Bingo – I know who she is and say, “you’re Renee xxxxxxxxxxx, I’ve been to your restaurants”. She says that’s always really nice to hear - and that’s about the last thing she says to me for the next 24 hours because I don’t think she’s thrilled that I’ve recognized her. I’m assuming she’s just shy! (by the way, I’m not mentioning her name, as I’m sure someone with a James Beard Award probably as a social media group searching for posts about her and I don’t need to add anymore angst to my recognition of her). Enough said! Mostly I thought it was cool that everyone there was from Seattle!!
Chef Michael says we’re going to make 4 kinds of pasta. Two are with just water & flour; two others with eggs. We learn all about different flours and milling. By the way, according to Michael, Barilla is shit – so if you buy that stuff – STOP! Chris & I team up and we make both types of dough – then it’s time for shaping. (The pasta did have to rest, so during that time, we also made 3 sauces & a filling for the tortellini). Two of the shapes were making me nuts – and I just couldn’t get the hang of it. One was kind of like making gnocchi, but was rolled off a board to form a little divet for sauce. Another was this twisty thing that you rolled out by hand like a length of spaghetti and then twisted it around a skewer and then pushed it off (amazing the thing stayed roughly curly – and it did in the water too!). That’s when I meet Fabrizia for the first time. She notices that I’m really struggling with this twisty shape and comes to help me. Not only does she get me up to speed, but she stays and finishes the rest of the dough with me so we’ll actually eat today!
The tortellini was my favorite shape – not too hard to get the hang of – and the filling was awesome. Dad, I will have to make this for you someday. It had ground pork & ground mortadella and it was REALLY, REALLY yummy! They served it as soup in a homemade chicken broth. Yum!
The twisty shape got this pesto from Trapani Region – a tomato, almond, mint concoction that actually was my favorite. I’ll have to see if I can find more of that when I’m in Trapani later this week. The small gnocchi-like shape got a simple tomato sauce (this is one of the dishes Michael got chastised for making since tomatoes are NOT in season according to Fabrizia – but he used a jar of homemade tomato sauce put up last season by the 2 women in the kitchen) – really good! The last pasta was hand cut linguine and it got a Bolognese sauce which Michael said was a really fast one – but trust me, no lack of flavor here. He used this tomato paste made with sun dried tomatoes & wine called “estratto”. This is the holy grail, the secret sauce, the answer to why food in Sicily tastes SO GOOD. Dad, I will bring a jar home for you – it will make everything you cook taste better than it should. The process to make this stuff is time-consuming and done with love. Sicilian grandmothers know what they are doing!
By the way, wine is flowing the whole time!
We get a few hours off to relax & I do the meditation in the garden thing. We return to the kitchen around 5:30 and I find only Chris and Chef Michael. Apparently, the others are at the BIG HOUSE – having dinner & wine with the other side of the family! Good for us – cooking lesson for two! We get a lot of hands on work and make a bunch of vegetable dishes. I learned all about cardoons (lots of work, but so delicious) and some other interesting stuff about how vegetables are supposed to be prepared. It ends of being Chef Michael, Fabrizia, two of the interns (Hannah – who’s been sick for 2 days already and Natalie – who lives in Rome with her Irish husband and is from San Diego), Chris & myself. The wine is flowing and so is the conversation. Fabrizia is very well traveled in the US and knows a lot about a lot. She’s also from a privileged, wealthy Sicilian family and boy, does she have a lot to say about Sicilians. She truly wants to help them – but they don’t want help. They don’t trust anyone and they’re stuck in their old ways. She talks about how hard it’s been to get support for her business from the locals. Eye opening for me who keeps thinking I want to start a business in Sicily. She’s generous with her time & perspective. Thank you Fabrizia! We have yummy almond cookies for dessert that Chris & I made.
We get up early and Fabrizia drives us to a sheep farm; the restaurant group follows in a separate car. We’re going to meet the sheep, the cheese maker Filippo Privitera, learn how to make pecorino & ricotta, and taste a bunch of cheese. There’s a bunch of pictures for you to look at. If you’ve never seen cheese being made, it’s both fascinating & back-breaking. While we’re waiting for milk to come up to temperature, Filippo takes us to meet some sheep that have been separated from the herd. These are males that have pulled out and won’t be allowed to breed. Why we ask, what’s wrong with them? Apparently, they have nipples that are too small! Now, why would too small nipples on a male be bad? Well, if they breed, they could pass these along to the next generation and too small nipples are bad when sheep need to be milked twice a day. Good to know!
We taste 2-day old cheese, fresh cheese & ricotta at various stages of their process. I love sheep milk & sheep’s milk cheese – gotta say, it’s ruined me for cow milk ricotta and fresh pecorino (they don’t age it past 2 weeks like they do in the north) is pretty nice indeed. Cool experience, cool dog too!
By the way, the guy in the red shirt in the pictures just wouldn’t cooperate with my photography. I was trying to get him face on so you could see how much he looks like my brother, Dean. Check out the hairline at least – but trust me, he looked like Dean.
We return to the farm and have some elderberry cooler (spiked with elderberry liqueur) and start a 9 cheese, cheese tasting . . cheeses from all over Sicily. I ate up every bit of them with a couple of glasses of wine! Then we had a light, vegetable lunch with really yummy salad and some other stuff the kitchen women had made. Then, it’s time for a break. I hang with the interns and get their stories and then do a little meditating in the garden (I love this place). We return to the kitchen prepared to get bloody – as Chef Michael told me to be prepared because we were working with carnage (I love this guy!).
The restaurant team is gone now and it’s just Chris & me again. We do ALL the prep work and most of the cooking – perfect to me – not so much for Chris. We gut, de-head & fillet about 4 dozen sardines for Pasta with Sardines and roll veal into involtini skewers. I got really excited that we were having some meat, as it’s the first real protein I’m going to have in a few days, and I tell Chef Michael that I’m going to eat more than my fair share of these. He assures me, there will be leftovers. (He was right, I was too full to consume more than 1 ½).
We make some side dishes and this great almond pudding. To start the pudding, Chef pulls out a jar of almonds. I grab one and he says, “wait, we have to see if these are bitter or sweet almonds . . so just have a small amount”. I break off a corner and discover, yes, they are the bitter ones. Good he says, because they’re poisonous and I didn’t want you to get too sick. Thanks Michael . . . apparently you have to eat about 12 to die! Also, good to know!! The pudding is a definite make again – Mom, I’ll make this just for you – since you love almonds as much as I love pistachios!
Dinner is the same 6 of us from the night before and the wine is flowing heavy tonight. Fabrizia starts to tell us all about her childhood and her British Nanny. Seems her grandfather & uncle were kidnapped by the Mafia at some point and it’s an interesting family story (though for her grandmother, it was less than interesting and more a scary thing). She starts dropping names of famous American chefs – all good friends – and I’m loving her stories. Again, I’ll refrain from posting them here, since the social media gurus would be all over this stuff. I go to bed, stuffed!
In the morning, it’s time for our last breakfast and good-byes. But not before we dig into about a dozen different kinds of jam. This farm grows everything and they can everything too! Orange marmalade, better than anything I ever tasted from England. Mandarin, fig, cherry, stone fruit, apple, you name it – you got it .. and honey from the farm too. I don’t know how they do it, but those women in the kitchen make THE BEST yogurt that I have ever eaten. Move over Greek yogurt – I love you – but this stuff’s got you beat!!! I dish up a big bowl and top it with honey & cherry jam. DELICIOSA!!!
I pack up the car and have decided to alter my original plans to visit a couple of “family origin” towns: Sclafani Bagna and Chiusa Sclafani. According to Fabrizia, the road to Sclafani Bagna is “broken” and I won’t be able to get through. Enough of these broken roads! I alter my plans & plan to head east to see Piazza Armerina, a UNESCO site. I can’t check in to my place in Sciacca until 4:30pm so I might as well see something amazing.
I give everyone a big hug good-bye, thank them for their hospitality and head out.
My splurge . . worth every penny!
