28-Feb-2006

This morning marked the second time I got to go to my Italian cuisine course. As before, it was amazing. I was a little bit less thrilled about some of the dishes, but overall that class is easily my favorite. That’s a real hard sell though. We made a great and simple appetizer of toast, garlic, tomato, and oil called bruschetta with a twist. Then we made this weird bacon sauce for these big pasta noodles. Kind of strange, but it had a good flavor. The next part was the real kicker; I learned how to cook clams and mussels. Yeah, it was a little bit scary. I did try them both though, and I think I like mussels more. We ate them over pasta, which was okay, but I think the selfish may have been better on their own. Our secondo piatta was a fish dish with about a thousand other ingredients. It was really a strange mix of ingredients too. We used olives, raisins, pine nuts and a bunch of other random things and then some whitefish. It wasn’t horrible, but I don’t think I’d be able to recreate it even if I wanted to.

After class I got motivated to do some cooking and decided it was about time that I try to make gnocchi since I liked it so much from last class. I bought the ingredients and got excited about my adventure. I followed the recipe and failed miserably to make the right little shapes, but that shouldn’t have effected too much. I’m not quite sure where the whole thing went wrong, but I suppose it’s too late to worry about that now. Maybe I used the wrong potatoes or something because it just wasn’t working so well. I pitched the whole thing and decided I’d just make regular pasta with the same sauce that I was going to use on the gnocchi. Yeah, that didn’t work either. So in short, I failed at making pasta twice tonight. Quite the accomplishment if I do say so myself.

Other than that, I did some homework and I’m looking forward to finishing another Nicholas Sparks book tonight. Maybe I do have too much time on my hands. I think I need a job.