|
 |
||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
|
Sample
Week of the Awaiting Table
Italian Cooking Holiday With numerous Italian and local holidays, food festivals, concerts and seasonal foods available for a limited time, we'd be hard-pressed to describe any particular week as "typical". Still, at your cooking school vacation you should look forward to something like this:
Sunday: Arrival. Far and away the best time to arrive is on the Sunday evening Eurostar from Rome. We’ll give you some to time to refresh and then meet for our first dinner together at 8:30 pm. We'll collect you at your B and B, then take a short walk through the streets of Lecce to the school for a festive, staff-prepared dinner. You will meet our staff and local friends. We'll discuss the week, get to know each other and then dine on many of the dishes you'll learn to make in the ensuing days. A four-hour meal is not uncommon. After dinner we'll take a late-night stroll around town to see the world-famous churches, the amphitheatres and our impressive castle right in the city centre. We’ll drop you back at your B and B and point to the café where we meet in the mornings (all of this in the heart of the city). Monday: We'll meet for an excellent espresso, then walk to the open market, where you'll meet Luigi, who grows all his own vegetables, Sandro, Ermanno and Giovanni, the gregarious butchers and Antonio, our fresh flower vendor, who truly loves what he does. We'll have a short, onsite Italian lesson, teaching you the words you'll need to buy your fruit and vegetables and the phrases that will help you get the most out of your time in Italy (not just on this trip, but on future trips as well). We’ll buy the biggest loaf of bread you’ve ever seen, gather our fresh produce and then head home to make fresh pasta, for both lunch and dinner. We’ll cook lunch together, then sit and enjoy the meal (always two hours). You will have a little free time, perhaps for a nap or reading. Then we’ll meet again for dinner, uncork some world-class wine and leisurely prepare our meal, which usually ends around midnight. | "Specialising
in small, intimate hands-on classes based on personalised
instruction and individual attention."
Overview
of Awaiting Table Housing
for our Italian cooking classes Comments
from previous students |
|||||||
Wednesday: In the morning, Lecce’s premiere artistic guide will show you the city, which you will see through her local and particularly sensitive eye. You’ll better grasp Italy’s placement in the Mediterranean, the role that Greece played in her history and begin to see Central and Northern Italy from a southerner’s perspective. You’ll also be able to take advantage of the guide’s excellent contacts, gaining the rare ability to pursue your own personal interests using local contacts: ceramics and shopping, papier-mâché and music, wrought-iron and boutique foods. After two days spent cooking, you’ll get the afternoon off. We meet in the early evening to make fresh sausages from scratch. Weather-permitting, we’ll grill them over olive wood lump-charcoal and accompany them with our own house Primitivo, handmade for us by our friend, Anna-Lisa, who often joins us for dinner and explains how she makes the wine. Thursday: We’ll visit Romana, our fish monger, and buy fish for dinner. We’ll drop it at the school and then compose really, really good sandwiches of left-over grilled sausages, charred bell peppers, local cheeses and a two-napkin, garlicky vinaigrette that the crusty bread absorbs. We’ll pack the picnic baskets and head for Otranto, one of the prettiest beach towns in all of Italy. We’ll eat lunch on the beach and if the weather is good, you can even enter the water. After lunch you’ll see the largest mosaic cycle in all of Europe, as historically significant and intellectually rigorous as the Divine Comedy, but virtually unknown outside of Italy. We’ll head back to Lecce, take a break and then meet for a grilled fish dinner with lots of bone-dry local white wine.
Friday: This is the students’ day and anything can happen. We most often cook a local version of fish soup for lunch, but some groups elect to make fresh egg pasta instead (not local, but still Italian). Friday night is a house party, and we’ll open some special bottles of wine.You will have chosen your favourite dishes from the week and will prepare a massive meal for the staff and favourite friends from the week. Small gifts are often exchanged and things tend to get a little sentimental. Someone will bring a guitar and there will be singing, but we’ll hopefully stop on the positive side of actually forming a conga line. Saturday: Free morning (with or without aspirin). We’ll have arranged your departure for you. Most take the Eurostar to Rome or a cab to airport in Brindisi. Weeping and exchanging addresses. To
learn more about the types of food you will be making, take sausages, for
example, click
here. |
||||||||
The Awaiting Table Italian Cooking School offers
cookery courses in Lecce,
Italy. In our Italian
cooking classes, learn
regional pasta, wine, and savory and succulent
dishes. Come be a local:
holidays include visits to vineyards and wineries, markets and olive groves
in season. The perfect vacation for people who want to be immersed in Italian
culture and food.
Learn about
our cooking school programs, our
founder,
the locals you’ll meet and our
accommodations.© 2007-08
The Awaiting Table - All Rights Reserved
|
||||||||
With
numerous Italian and local holidays, food festivals, concerts
and seasonal foods chasing one another on the calendar, we'd
be hard-pressed to describe any particular week as "typical".
Tuesday: More
or less the same format as Monday, although Puglia’s
excellent meats will be on the menu, as opposed to
Monday’s fish (Romana, our fish monger, closes
on Tuesdays). We’ll fricassee rabbit, make a
great ceci bean soup and open wines you’ve only
read about.
