The Giglio Cooking School in Florence

For our first evening in Florence we had the honour of participating in a private cooking course at the Giglio Cooking School, located a few minutes walk from the city centre. This wonderful experience was a gift from our friends Christine and Mike, whose wedding we are attending later this month on July 25 in northern Italy. Thanks so much you two! We had a wonderful time and will draw upon our lesson for years to come. I can’t believe how easy it is to make gnocchi and how labour intensive it was to make a dish our teacher referred to as “the green children”, which was a zucchini baked puree pastry. The class started at 6:00 pm and we sauntered our stuffed bellies out of Marcella’s around 9:45 pm. The menu consisted of: gnocchi with pesto sauce, veal chops stuffed with cheese, zucchini souffle and tiramisu for desert. Of course…Continue Reading

Chilean Cooking Class

We had a really great time taking a Chilean cooking class in Valparaíso. We met our guide and chef, Vlad, in a coffee shop on Sotomayar Square. We also met our new American friends and cooking buddies Tamara and Chris, who would be joining us for the class. These two are enjoying a very cool 12 month sabbatical traveling all over South America. After a pleasant coffee, we hopped on a local bus to get down to the market. Vlad is a very interesting fellow. Chef, former marine, mixed martial artists, and lifelong Valparaísian, he taught us about hunting out the freshest fish (in our case the fish was Reineta, and the trick was looking for red under the gills) and we also picked up a bunch of fresh produce, before heading to get some wine and go back to the cooking school perched atop Cerro Artillería. We began the…Continue Reading