Classy

Today is our first full day at Nerbona, and we've got a cooking class and a day trip to Sienna on the docket. Somehow, regardless of time zone, I still wake up at 6:00, so I get to walk around the place before anyone else is up and about.

That first shot shows the entrance to my apartment, along with my patio and table. That table is where most of writing for this blog has been done, over first breakfast since the kitchen doesn't start serving breakfast until 8:30. How did I get to this life where I'm spending quiet mornings snacking on bread and cured meats in a shady spot in Tuscany?

This week should be interesting as I do not know most of the people in the group. And those I do know, I haven't seen outside of occasional video chat for more than 2 years.

After second breakfast, we caravan to a nearby grocery store and have entirely too much fun picking out snacks and booze for the week. Back at the villa, some of us check out the pool while others head out on day trips. They tell us the cooking class will start at 4:30, which is kind of a surprise - we thought it was at 1 and we'd hit Sienna after. We negotiate to a 5:30 start time and hop into a couple of cars to spend the afternoon, instead of the evening, in Sienna. The walk into town is a bit steep, but the city itself is nice and lunch is giant slices of pizza followed by gelato. We walk around and look at a few things, poke our heads in a few shops and then make our way back well ahead of class.

I am definitely out of my league in the cooking class. We are making pasta, and I'm at a table with David and Amanda, who both do far more cooking, including bread making. As the class goes on, the instructor and assistant spend more and more time on remedial training for me, eventually declaring my overly dry dough "better for lasagna noodles" than the noodles we're supposed to be making. My only solace is David over flouring his dough when he's rolling it out and getting the same speech about lasagna noodles. Of course, his are at least cut straight.

After we roll out and cut noodles, and assemble eggplant parmesan, we get shuffled out of the kitchen for a while so the real cooks can turn our efforts into an actual meal. This is my time to shine - I slip back to the apartment long enough to make a pitcher of Aperol spritz and show the group I am not without uses.

This is definitely not the batch I made.