La Dolce Vita: Tiramisu Edition

Friday night the four of us took a cooking class at Scuola Cucina di Lella. One of the program leaders walked us twenty minutes through the city of Siena and down about seven escalators. Right? Escalators in the ancient cities of Siena whose heard of such a thing? Supposedly it was a crazy steep hill that called for hundreds of motion-censored escalators. Well, given my fear of these moving stair, my complete intolerance for anymore walking, and me and Joey’s short attention span and playful manner, we fell behind the rest of the group and ended up missing one of the turns leaving us in the middle of a dark and deserted city square for a good ten minutes. Finally after asking for information with my impressive Italian vocabulary (Di dove la (I admit I said escuela instead of scuola but it got the point across) cucina?) we found our program leader in her puffy white jacket. She looked kind of frantic that she counted 15 children instead of 19, whoops.


On the menu was pici all'aglione, gnocci al gorgonzola, and tiramisu. The open kitchen looked staged like it was the Rachel Ray Show. It was filled with pots, pans and wooden spoons of all shapes and sizes and every gadget and gizmo a "pampered chef" like my mother could ever dream of. In the kitchen stood Lella, our little old Italian cooking teacher, her silent partner (literally this little woman did not say a word she just moved swiftly around the kitchen cleaning our stations and shifting things around), and our translator the Italian Jack Osbourne, though I never got his I do know that he was a foreign exchange student and Lella was his host mother. So now he helps her out translating for her American cooking students. Aww, SO CUTE! And now for the food...


Since the tiramisu needs to form in the fridge we made that first. To make tiramisu you will need 4 eggs, sugar, mascarpone (which I finally found out is a kind of cheese.. or butter? I'm still unsure), lady fingers or another kind of cookie that absorbs liquids or flavors and stuff, espresso, whiskey, and cocoa powder. So here's what you do first:

1) Crack the eggs and separate the yolk from the white. You will be using both components so make sure you do not dispose of one or the other. In one bowl combine 3/4 a cup of sugar and the four egg yolks until they are thick and frothy (whatever that means).

2) Add 2 cups of Mascarpone to the mixture and blend with an electronic hand blender (or else ladies will look like Schwarzenegger) until you begin to see peaks

This next one amazed me. . .

3) Blend the four eggwhites in a NOT hand electronic blender on the highest speed. The next time I looked the eggwhites I have when I diet looked like a big bowl of snow! Just from being blended for a few minutes at an ultimate speed my least favorite part of the sunny side ups looked like the top of a lemon meringue pie. I was flabbergasted! (Lol) So fascinating.


4) Add the eggwhites to the mascarpone mixture by folding the eggwhites into the other. Not mix, fold! This is very important although I cannot tell you why.

Lady fingers covered the bottom of a huge lasagna tray. The fingers were soaked in espresso and covered with whiskey. If your not a whiskey person, Lella says that any kind of alcohol will do. Some people even use martini! This is the part that causes me to never order or eat tiramisu otherwise. I hate coffee! Ever since I was young and would throw something in the garbage to find a smelly trash bag with smelly coffee grinds I have never had the desire to drink coffee or any of its cousins (the frappuccino, the espresso, the latte). I'm strictly a hot coco girl. So while lady fingers would be right up my alley if i were ever to make this on my own, my fingers would be soaked in hot coco or something like it. Next issue is the whiskey. First of all what am I a pirate? Why would I ever like whiskey? I don't even like the cheap Svedka we get at school, ugh shivers! So again my version would cut out the whiskey and use apple juice. Just kidding, but seriously no whiskey no hard liquor at all. Vom.


Now that you have all of your preparatory work done cover the lady fingers with the mascarpone and eggwhite mixture. If you would like multiple layers (it's just funner that way- i know funner isn't a word but it is funner) don't use the whole mascarponey thing in one shot. Lella used a little American twist by sprinkling chocolate chips ontop of the layer and then adding a bit of cocoa powder. 

Repeat with more lady fingers and more mascarponey stuff along with more chocolate chips and cocoa powder as you please. This is a dessert to be eaten the same day and cannot be frozen (Mommie) because it will lose it's form or something. Put it in the fridge for at least an hour before serving and Benissimo! Tiramisu :0)

Will tell you about the pastas later. Desperate need of a nap! Out tonight for the last night out in Siena. Florence this weekend finally! Oh yeah, and SWITZERLAND the weekend after that!

Siena, So Far

I’ve been in Siena since Saturday but haven’t blogged once, except to tell you about London, so here’s the deal…

Siena is beautiful, there’s no doubt about that.  The city is old and remotely quiet with cobblestone roads built on upwards and downwards hills that are getting easier to walk- and regain my breath- as the days go on.  The windows have those wooden shutters painted in blues and reds and greens with tiny pots of flowers on the windowsills like something out of My House in Umbria.  The streets look like big alleyways with storefront and restaurant windows except these main road alleyways also serve as highways being that cars, buses, and motorcycles whip around the corners and speed down the streets.  Joey knows a girl who got her foot run over by a car in Florence and like… now I get how that happened.

It was a total culture shock when we went to a restaurant and ordered chicken parmesan to be stared at like we had three heads.  No chicken parm? No calamari fritti? I thought these were classic Italian dishes? WTF? Cul-ture shock.  We did manage to find some good gnocchi in a four-cheese sauce, a caprice salad (not really a salad just mozzarella and tomato), a pizza appetizer from every place we go and I even got a white slice with prosciutto.  So delish.  It’s been really hard to find chicken here too! We finally got a good piece of grilled chicken with a little bit of olive oil and lemon on it.  The gelato is fabulous!  I had hazelnut gelato on a cone with homemade whipped cream that was out of this world.  Speaking of hazelnut- to those of you camp people who only got Nutella as a special visiting day treat and finished it by the time Olympics broke out like us Lokanda-ers- they have it here like its strawberry jam or Skippy peanut butter, favorite.  Other than that tonight me and Joey split the grilled chicken and this cheese and pesto ravioli with a tomato cream and black truffle sauce on top.  Basically, we were licking the plate. 

The central point of the “city” is the Piazza del Campo.  Us dumb Americans just call it “the circle”.  There are restaurants and souvenir shops lining the circle on one side and a big church with a bell and tower clock on the other.  All of the restaurants have nice outdoor seating and they are all connected with similar menus.  After asking for tiramisu and watching our waiter go from our restaurant to the one next door, I’m convinced they’re all the same thing.  The middle of the campo is an open field except its cobblestone and not grass.  Still kids and couples and families sit and lay on the stone and talk or eat gelato or do homework or kiss.  Being single and living in this city must be devastating because the PDA is an orange on the terrorist scale and every beautiful guy is with a fugly girl.  Other than seeing couples there are so many cute dogs.  These dogs aren’t like the obese slobbery American dogs.  They’re posh and polished and even a not so big animal lover like myself finds them adorable. 

Like usual Pinot Grigio accompanies us at most dinners and some of our checks can be paid in AIFS food stamps… were on Italian welfare. 

TGIF.  We signed up for a cooking class for tonight and a tour in San Gimignano tomorrow .  Sunday were supposed to go to the torture museum so we should be in for a fun filled weekend.  More about that and classes later.

Grandma: Since the TV here is all in Italian, I've decided to start watching Parenthood.  Just one more show for us to talk about!!

Daddie: I've fallen asleep without the TV two nights in a row now.  Italy changes you.

Ciao Bella!

P.S. IT’S SNOWING IN SIENA!!