Day 6: Cooke's in the kitchen

Today was the day I've been waiting for. Our cooking class!! I woke up ready to go. First things first, we hit the market again, to purchase some fresh veggies. Here are some more wonderful pictures of the market:

bottles of wine

veggies on veggies

beans / dried foods

Then we met over at the Ponte Vecchio, to walk to "In Tavola" for a cooking course. On the way, we saw this cutie pie couple:

and this terrifying statue person

Wedding maybe ? We're not sure

I was jumping out of my skin when we finally got there. When we arrived, all the ingredients were set up for us: 

 Of course snapped a few pics while we were waiting around: 

No you don't need to tell me how attractive I look in a plastic apron...

 Then we got the ball rolling, the menu for the day: for our antipasto, an artichoke souffle or Sformato di Carciofi, with Potato Gnocci with Meat sauce or Ragu alla Bolognese and tomato and garlic sauce, with a "chocolate dessert" Or Dolce al Cioccolato.
We broke up into groups of five, every two groups with their own chef who bounced around and gave each group member tasks to complete to create the three courses.

whipping up the Chocolate cake, separated two eggs, whisked the whites until foamy, and combined the yolks with sugar and melted chocolate. It smelled so so so amazing!

everything folded together! Buenisima!

Colleen working hard mashing the potato for the gnocchi...she also was a whiz at peeling them while I almost sliced my finger off. She got rejected from separating the eggs....which my proficiency gained me the compliment of being a "good housewife some day". Colleen is going to be great housewife too.

Start of the sauce, celery carrot and onion in some olive oil

the tomatoes boiled for the sauce, no canned tomatoes for us

filling up the ramekins with dessert and sprinkling with cocoa

Gnocchi!! 

our meat sauce....getting there!!! 

Kelli and I cheesing away :D

our chef chopping away

Manning the sauce

My beauty roomates

After all that hard work, we got to taste the spoils of our labor. They took us down to a beautiful wine cellar to eat

The artichoke souffle. Sadly enough, I really didn't love this. But it was good to try!

Showing off our plates

the gnocchi with the tomato sauce

and with the meat sauce....absolutely amazing!

Dessert

and naturally we made friends with our chef as well!

Overall, it was such a fun and wonderful experience. Again, proving the fact that simple fresh ingredients can make the best food. I think I smiled the entire time. We returned home, passing by the Ponte Vecchio in the rain, and decided on another night in. We stopped for a few moments at Palazza de la Repubblica and checked out the gorgeous Merry go Round

 Inspired by my culinary experience from earlier (and my hunger from only sampling a bit of the food), I cooked dinner with Colleen! The chicken I bought at the grocery was cut so nice and thin, no need to do much work with it except remove the fatty parts. I drizzled it in some olive oil, pepper, (would have used salt if we had any) and lemon and baked it. It cooked really quickly because of its thinness. Colleen sauteed some garlic and zucchini, I tossed together a salad and voila! An amazing dinner with some amazing company

Colleen killed it. This ended up being my favorite part. Go girl!

Looks good right?!

Hilary (one of my sisters in Chi Omega) and Shannon, a friend from UNH came over to see us!

Gelato. But of course

We watched Bridesmaids and then conked out. Good night Firenze!