When in Rome: Week of Relaxation

03/28/11, 03/29/11, 03/30/11

After a very tiring and long week of traveling for spring break, I was looking very forward to my week of relaxation before my mom got to Rome on Thursday. On Tuesday morning, we had our weekly Layers of Rome class. This week we were focusing on Caravaggio and his artwork. We traveled to two churches to admire it and while his paintings were very life like and beautiful, one of my favorite paintings I saw while there wasn’t one of his pieces. Instead, it was a picture of Jesus where it was an optical illusion. You could see him with his eyes open and with them closed depending on where on his face you looked. It was really neat!

One of Caravaggio's pieces

Piece that I really liked

Wednesday marked the start of our series of three cooking classes over the course of the semester. I was really excited as this was one of the main aspects of the program I’m in that drew me to it. We met in the kitchen of a restaurant where our teacher met us. Our teacher is the chef from a restaurant called Glass, it has one star in the Michelin Guide, which I think is quite the accomplishment! She was pretty tough, but I really enjoyed our time with her and learned a lot. The focus of the class this week was rice and pasta. Therefore, we made one risotto dish and one pasta dish. We started with the risotto, having a lesson on rice before starting. We made the broth of the risotto first by slicing carrots, celery and onions, and boiling them in water. It needed to boil for about forty-five minutes. Therefore, in the meantime we started to prepare our pasta, we were making pasta with carbonara sauce. I never realized how simple it was to make, but it turned out delicious and I look forward to making both of these recipes when I get home. To make the sauce, you first need egg yolks in a bowl, then you grind in Parmesan and Pecorino cheese and mix the three ingredients together. After this, we had to slice the meat that goes in it. It is similar to bacon, but different than what we would find in America. We sliced it up finely and put it on the stove to fry. We also started boiling the water and noodles. When the noodles were about done, we poured a ladle full of hot water into our mixed sauce to liquefy it. However, to prevent the eggs from scrambling, you had to stir constantly. This was the final step in the sauce, and we drained the pasta and added it to the sauce, still continuously stirring. Lastly, we added the bacon on top and mixed that in as well, making for a wonderful pasta with carbonara sauce! With this done, it was time to go back to the risotto. We put rice into a pan on the stove and added salt and boiling water from the broth that we had previously boiled. This was all that had to be done to cook the rice itself. While this was happening, we also sliced gorgonzola cheese and pecans to add to the mix afterwards. As the rice finished cooking, we poured in the cheese and pecans and mixed it all together for another great dish! I had so much fun being in the kitchen and learning new recipes. I can’t wait to see if I can actually duplicate the recipes on my own this summer!