Italian Cooking Classes and Wine!!!

Weekends like this make us truly realize how lucky we are to live in Italy.  Saturday we spent the day at a local winery with friends learning to cook a four course Italian/German meal, drinking wine bottled right there in the cellars, and enjoying the company of our Italian hosts who serenaded us on guitar following our meal.  It was an amazing day!

The group: Nate, Leslie, Allison, Tom and Anne, ready to cook

I must expand a bit on the menu, to give you a full idea of how amazing the day was. We started by preparing the meat dish: osso bucco, which, once settled in a bed of carrots and onions was covered in wine and cooked slowly over the course of 3+ hours.  We then learned the art of making homemade spinach spaetzle (more German than Italian) which once cooked, was served with a gorgonzola cream sauce with speck (Italian bacon).  Our appetizers were equally as delicious…. Young asiago cheese encrusted in polenta and hazelnuts and heated until gooey and served with a warm berry sauce.  They were amazing!!!  Once the osso bucco was done cooking, it nearly fell off the bone into the accompanying creamy saffron risotto we had also whipped up.  As if we weren’t stuffed enough, we were then taught the art of crepe making.  The whole meal was to die for and best of all, my husband was totally enthralled by the whole thing and insisted we buy a spaetzle maker the next day at the Italian grocery store.  He replicated the spaetzle dish a couple days later! Wahoo! 

The guys are focused... women supervising

Making spaetzle!

Osso bucco ready to be cooked

The finished product with saffron risotto!

Cooked spaetzle

As if the meal wasn’t enough we were treated to more amazing Italian wine.  We are getting so spoiled!!!!!  We were taken into the cellar; an amazing large room  with arched ceilings and a large table in the middle for hosting dinner parties (we are returning later this week) and of course rows of wine barrels.  We were given samples of wine straight from the barrel while learning about the history of the winery and the process of wine making, all the while drinking with the owner.

The cellar

Wine pulled straight from the barrel

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We’ve now become good friends with the owners, who are going to start hosting these cooking classes once a month!  I’m thrilled to learn some more true Italian recipes to impress friends and family with when we return J  What an amazing time!