La Cucina Italiana: Antipasti

Today marked the beginning of a week-long journey of Italian cooking, baking and eating! As apart of my school, I get to spend a week learning about this amazing culture through FOOD. My dream!

The course is called "La Cucina Italiana", or, "I won't tell you the meaning of that, because if you can't figure it out you should probably leave now". Each and every day we will be cooking our way through the traditional Italian dinner, with a different course each day. Today, we started with antipasti! The appetizers! We made a heaping pot of minestrone soup, fresh bruschetta, pesto to accompany both, and finally, about 3 pounds of biscotti! 

The day began with a fresh espresso (brewed on none other than a chemistry hot plate), and some real biscotti's from North Beach, along with some italian movie clips.

working hard or hardly working?

We began by preparing the veggies for the minestrone soup, which took around 2 AND A HALF HOURS to cook. Obviously, the time in between was spent prepping our bruschetta, the pesto, and the giant log of homemade biscotti!

getting excited to chop some veggies for the minestrone!

Mrs. Ferrara--the master of italian food

bruschetta...mmm!

The biscotti was a challenging task to take on. The recipe called for only 16 measly biscottis, so naturally, we decided to quadruple the recipe instead. The dough was massive and tough, but we finally managed to wrangle the beast of sticky, almond biscotti goodness onto the cookie sheet. 

Yet, the log was so big that the center didn't even cook through. my favorite thing ever!! so we had to put it back in the oven a couple more times...oh, how I wish we'd just left it completely under baked. A girl can dream...

After waiting so long for the soup to come out, although very delicious, most of us found it to be extremely under-seasoned. Though all it took was some extra salt, pepper, parmesan cheese, and pesto to give it a little kick! The soup was very tasty otherwise, especially when you got the chunks of soft potato...

Overall, a successful first day! I can feel a food baby coming on!