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Bon Appetit
WHAT: Travel   |   WHEN: February 13, 2009
While in Lucca, we took a half day cooking class with Chef Paolo Monti, and seeing as I'm Italian and eating is my favorite hobby, I was in culinary heaven that day.

BTW, before go any further, I can't take credit for any of the cool stuff we did on this trip. Kylie pretty much planned the whole thing, and she brought me along as extra baggage. Thanks, sweetie!

Chef Paolo was actually interviewed a couple years ago by both PBS and the Discovery Channel since he was one of the first people to use the web in its relative infancy as a marketing tool to advertise international cooking classes back in 1996. This guy is one smart canoli. As good as he is at his cooking craft, he's just as talented when it comes to business acumen. He doesn't wait for business to come to him; he goes and finds the business. We (and by we I mean Kylie), just found him by doing a simple Google search for Italian cooking classes, and voila, there he was. We felt very fortunate because often his classes have 20+ students, but it was off season and he was nice enough to do the class with just Kylie and I, so we got some extra special personal love.

In this class, there were 12 things on our menu... and we ate all. of. them. The theme of the class was every day Italian with an emphasis on making sauces that can be used in a variety of favorite Italian dishes. We started off making a little stock and a base red sauce that could be - with the addition of any number of ingredients - turned into several different types of sauces. Then we started off with two kinds of bruschetta, and from there moved on two a couple different types of pastas with different red and white sauces. After that we served up a pork dish with an amazing lemon and cream sauce. Next up was a little chicken cacciatore, and we brought it home with the best tiramasu I'd ever had. I'm not really a tiramasu fan, but I'd make an exception any day of the week for this stuff... it was so light and fluffy. [did I really just say light and fluffy?] ANyway, it was the perfect way to round out the class. Actually, I literally rounded out a bit by the time we were done. I coulda rolled back to our room.





I'm thinking the odds of me reproducing something that looks remotely close to the chicken cacciatore below ore laughable.


Being a carnivore, naturally my favorite sauce we made was the one with meat in it.


Finally, the tiramasu. Maybe I've been looking in all the wrong places for this before because it always seems like tiramasu I've had at other places is a lot like soggy bread with cold coffee... obviously whoever made that stuff was misinformed. The version we whipped with Chef Paolo was Iron Chef-worthy.



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