We wanted to do something special in Italy. We had talked about doing a cooking class, but after searching and searching online while in Bratislava, I thought that it may not happen because so many of them were sooooo expensive. We figured that they were only for rich tourists on massive vacation packages with no budgets. BUT, then we found www.lamiatoscana.info (La Mia Toscana) on a web page called www.slowtrav.com. They had a 4 day Tuscan cooking class that sounded perfect and the price wasn’t in the thousands. I dropped them an email and the rest is history.

Our host was Arianna.scany-italy-11406 She works for La Mia Toscana, but also has her own agency that you can see at www.ariannaandfriends.com. She was wonderful and I highly recommend her. We were set up to stay at an olive farm that also was a B & B. It was at an Agriturismo, which is Italian for agricultural tourism. Per our guru, Risk Steves, they were apparently set up in the 1980’s as a way for farmers to stay on their land and start a B & B at the same time. It was a great way to see some of the country side and also an excuse to rent a car and explore some of the surrounding hill towns in central Tuscany. Our B & B was at Agriturismo Il Selvino, www.ilselvino.it, run by Alessandro near the small town of La Rosa.

It was heaven. We had our own room. It wasn’t loud and crazy and I didn’t have to shower with other naked women in the room like at the hostel! It was in the countryside and there were beautiful hills and pine trees all around. The sun shine was beautiful and was 360 degrees all around me and not blocked by any “city” buildings.

They put us to work pretty quickly after we got there the first day, 11/4/06. It was our first cooking class and we were learning some typical Tuscan dinners. Arianna was our interpreter, while our chef, Marisa, gave us some of her secrets. Marisa didn’t speak much English, but I was quickly able to understand her “sign language” of what to do in the kitchen. It was so much fun. The longer I am in Europe, the more I realize that for some things you don’t need a language to communicate, hand signals work just fine in the kitchen, and lots of smiles and great laughs are always universal. We cooked for about 3- 3 1/2 hours and produced 8 different dishes, including a local desert. The dishes were being served not only to us but also to the other guests at the ranch. EEK the pressure! Everything turned out splendidly though. It was soooo good. I of course wrote all the recipes down, although I am sure I need to tweak some things since I know Marisa uses generous “pinches” of her spices and I am still not sure how much olive oil she was using sometimes aside from it looked like “gobs” as she just poured it into the pots LOL Olive oil flows like water in these Tuscan recipes!

Categories: Becky Blogs, Italy