A Taste of Italy

Finally we have arrived at the sacred ground of Italy (right Joey?). Ahhh. The lusciousness of it, the aromas, the fragrance, the garlic! We covered Northern Italy today and my team had 3 dishes to divide amongst us and I chose the one I wanted ASAP. One of these days these guys will realize that I'm not the real leader and start choosing for themselves. Until that happens, I'm taking the lead and cherry picking what I want to do.

Our choices were a warm salad of steamed veggies with a warm proscuitto dressing, hand rolled strands of freshmade pasta in a ragu of pancetta, and sausages and a million other things, and then the Veal stew in a porcini mushroom broth. That's the one I didn't want anyone to screw up. A hearty veal stew. I am the only female on my team and these guys all seem like they know what they're doing up front. I've concluded they are "players" and therefore delegate the cooking list for the day. They even come up to me and ask who and what's to cook. I'm amazed. It makes life pretty easy for me.

The guy on the pasta must have missed the class on rolling out pasta. This stuff was the size of 3 slices of white bread squashed down thick. I have never eaten such thick pasta. I should have made that dish. Pity. Then the guys on the salad, which had beets, forgot to keep the beets separate so the end result was a reddish green/brown broccoli with red everywhere. I hate beets anyway but I should have made that dish too.

I'm not trying to sound like a snob. I just know that some things are just not right no matter what the recipe says. Take my Lamb Stew for instance. I added some port wine for a bit of flavor while the meat was browning, I tasted while cooking and found it a bit flat so I added my best friend of Garlic then decided after a while that it still needed something else so I kicked it up a bit with crushed red pepper flakes. None of which was in the "recipe". The end result was pretty good but a bit much on the heat of the pepper flakes. Even still, our neighboring Chef came in and tried my stew and I heard him tell our Chef it was good. Then he turned back and got a whole bowl of it and ate it! YES! That was the best compliment since it was between the two chefs! I'm happy.

I ate my stew for dinner tonight too. Yumm... nighty-nite y'all.