Octopus!

This past week or two has been pretty much life back to normal. Not much to report except that I have been working A LOT and keeping myself very busy. Last week we moved offices at Apartments Florence. Twice. If only I had a picture of Nicco and myself carrying desks and chairs and printers and backpacks down the middle of the streets of Florence... We created quite a scene and I was pretty much in tears laughing the entire time. Last week was great. I babysat Lorenzo, worked and took a really great afternoon trip to Cortona.

Cortona is about an hour an a half by train from Florence. You may remember Cortona as the main setting for Under the Tuscan Sun. My friend and I left at 2 p.m. and arrived in Cortona just in time for shops to close for the afternoon. It didn't matter though as we ended up walking around taking pictures looking down over the Tuscan countryside below. In the spring, it is surrounded by endless fields of sunflowers (girasoli) so I will most definitely return. This time we walked, had some tea, drank some wine, ate a couple of bites and then headed back to Firenze. Not too shabby.

View from Cortona

Piazza della Repubblica, Cortona

Looking over the cemetery at the foot of Cortona

Chocolate Festival in Santa Croce

On Friday evening I cooked for some friends at home. I was nervous to cook Italian food for Italians. In the past I had only done American food for Italians, or Italian food for Americans. I made tagliatelle with zucchini and caoulifower and homemade tomato sauce. I was told that I did pretty good. That night we went to the Jazz Club, followed by a late night at Blob (where you get blobbed :) and 4 a.m. pasta with friends. Saturday was pretty uneventful, then Sunday for lunch, I had cooking lessons with Andrea and Leigh. I have some video of the pasta process that I need to get from Andrea to share with you. He made the tagliatelle and made an incredible ragu to go with it. It was actually indescribable. After lunch we all headed to Santa Croce for the chocolate festival. Yes, that's right. An entire festival of chocolate. White chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, hot chocolate, chocolate covered bananas, chocolate kebabs. It would have embarrassed Willy Wonka. (I will return there this week - only for research and to take pictures of course.) 

Allora, after the weekend of complete and utter glutony, I started a diet Monday morning. I'm cleansing this week with fruits and vegetables. The good news is that the fruits and veggies here are incredible and it's really not to hard. My reward is Friday night when I have dinner at Mamma and Babbo's. Tonight was a bit of a reward as well as I splurged on some white wine and OCTOPUS! Yea, you heard right. Octopus. It's the latest installment of what I (starting now) like to call, Cooking with Andrea. Tonight's edition was octopus, or "polpo" in Italiano. 

We made octopus salad with fresh octopus, celery, capers, lemon and parsley, as well as octopus meatballs which consisted of the leftover octopus bits and juice from the pressure cooker along with bread crumbs, garlic, parsley, salt, anchovies paste and eggs. 

And as a special edition, I have a video COOKING LESSON! I hope this is the first of many. Andrea is a natural teacher and a FABULOUS chef. Be warned - at the end, I don't have a final video moment of the finished products because my camera dies. However, I do have videos of the final products. Lessons learned: always have extra batteries for your Flip camera.

Buon appetito!