In Tavola

Ciao, amici! Being that it's Tuesday again, I spent most of the day in class. After that I came home, napped, checked Facebook, did laundry, then went back to school with Bethany, Erika and most of our classmates to meet for a one-time-only cooking class.

Petra met us at Cerchi at 7:30 to walk us to In Tavola, a Florentine cooking school on the other side of the Arno. 

If we hadn't been with Petra, we all would have missed this little culinary school since it is literally a hole in the wall. 

When we got there, we were immediately directed to split into groups of four or five and pick a work station in one of the two large kitchens. I joined in with Yelena, Erika, Lydia, and Jess, and we quickly got to work on our dinner and dessert.

But not before posing like Iron Chefs in our plastic aprons.

First, we made the tiramisu that would be our dessert (cream mixture/coffee-soaked cookies/more cream/more coffee cookies/chocolate powder/fridge) and dough for the noodles. I succeeded in making my flour into a little volcano to hold the eggs, but I failed miserably at cracking my first egg so that part of it landed on my shoe.

Alessandro, our instructor, came by just in time to see me evaluating the situation with the eggshell still in my hand. He made a joke about how I was already turning out to be a problem and took away my scraper so that I had to use a fork to mix the flour and eggs into a smooth dough.

It took me longer than everyone else because of this, but we got all of our dough made and started on the sauce and stuffing for the eggplant. We chopped tomatoes for the sauce and zucchini and potatoes for the stuffing, then cut the eggplant into round, thin slices.

We set the tomatoes to simmer into sauce and made triple decker stuffed eggplant towers with the zucchini/potato mixture and slices of cheese, topped with olive oil and more cheese.

Alessandro showing us how to make the eggplant towers.

After this, we retrieved our dough and rolled it out into noodles (the most time-consuming step, but one of the most fun).

Jess rolling the dough.

Lydia and Petra using the noodle maker.

Once our noodles were complete, it was time to dump them into the simmering tomato sauce and wait for everything to finish cooking so that we could plate it and take it to our tables in Tavola's dining room. 

Ta da!

This was a really fun class and the food was by far some of the best we've had in Firenze. The dining area at In Tavola is super cozy and inviting and we had a great time enjoying what we had so much fun preparing. Also, the staff was absolutely amazing and kept us laughing in the kitchen and all through dinner. 

It's a shame this was our only cooking class of the year, but Alessandro gave out recipe booklets for everyone to take home that have the recipes for each of the four dishes we made this evening. I can't wait to recreate all of this at La Casa de Aprile later this semester! This might be what we end up making Nicolo since we owe him a dinner now. 

Squisito!