We didn't set alarms last night and decided to see what would happen. When I woke up I asked Jay to pass me my phone off the charger and asked what time it was, he said it's 8:30..then looked more closely, it was 8:50am. So I went out onto the terrace, which is where we spend all of our time at the apartment if we aren't sleeping, and finished up the blog.
Sarah gets up around 9:30 and Anthony got up around 10:20am, everyone had a good sleep last night. Jay and Anthony did a fairly quick turn around and went out for a run and Sarah did a quick workout on the terrace while I hopped in the shower.
When everyone was done and showered we went out for lunch. As we were walking down the stairs Jay started giving my shoulders a little squeeze and then fake pushed me down the stairs. He commented how the Corey's have the kind of love that they hold hands down the stairs and we have a different kind of love. lol.
The street we are staying on, Corso Italia, is lined with lime trees. I want to take a picture of one and said "Jay" to get his attention and he backed out of the frame. I said "No, smile" "Oh, I thought you wanted me out of the picture, and I was like if I go any further out I'll be in traffic". I said "That's the kind of love we have...just a little further...just a little further".
We walk around for a bit, down the main pedestrian boulevard all the way to the end, which we haven't done yet. I was hoping there was a view of the water at the bottom but there wasn't too much. So we started to walk down towards the water, which is down down down...we're following Jay - at some point half way down I stop to check the map on my phone to make sure that where we are going actually leads back to town. It doesn't, but I remember from our conversation with Max when we checked in that he recommended this little beach area at the bottom for lunch or dinner. It just so happens to be lunch time so we continue down.
This is the view from our restaurant, which is out over the water.
Sarah, Anthony and I shared a lovely rose for lunch.
We give Jay the phone for the selfies because of his monkey arms, lol. He mentions how disappointed he is in Anthony that he hasn't shockered all the photos. I, for one, am happy :)
Jay ordered ravioli, which was delicious.
Sarah and I shared a Marguerita pizza with prosciutto and had them bring us some arugula on the side.
Walking over to the other side of the beach (where you can see the fort on the left in the photos above), this guy is snoozing right at the base of the stairs which will take us up and over and back into town.
In Italy what goes down must go up.
Once we get up we have a birds eye view of the pier - Jay said that when he and Anthony did their run down there it wasn't very nice at all, he said it was like Niagara Falls, cheap touristy crap whereas in the main area we are staying near is a mix of nice shops and some cheap shops.
As we are walking back Jay talks to Kent, we finally got our working drawings last night (end of working day for you but middle of the night for us) and Kent is going to go in and get our permit for the foundation this week. Jay emailed a copy of the plans to the UPS store in town and he'll print them out for us and Kent will pick up the copies to get started.
This is the view from the bottom up, Jay took it on his run.
On the way back we go to pick up the girls gifts, for 5Eu we had an initial embroidered on them. I said to the girl as I picked them up "What is the best way to wash these?" She looked at me and said "In the machine". Ok then.
We have our cooking class tonight and have to leave for Positano at 5pm to get there for 6pm. Its 3:30pm when we get back to the house. Sarah and Anthony stopped along our road to do a bit of shopping and Jay and I went up to the apartment. They came up a little before 5pm and just changed and we headed out. We went to the taxi stand just across the street and there was a taxi there but no driver, she came a few minutes later as I was across the street checking with a travel agency on how to order a taxi. The trip over was 82 Eu. Once we arrived we were close, we followed the directions to find the cooking class. Peter, the chef, met us on the street, he was chatting with his Dad, and led us into the garden where you access the little kitchen he's built at the back of the house.
When I booked the class it got really good reviews, it said that there could be up to 8 people in the class but there were only the 4 of us, which was awesome.
Peter explained that everything he uses for the class is clean and organic. The bison that we are using for the first appetizer is cured like a prosciutto (but doesn't taste salty), it was raised in a national park and every year they have to cull the herd so they issue licenses to farmers and merchants who will use the meat.
He said there are 2 ways you can tell that a prosecco is really good. If it says "Metodo Charmat" which basically means its a champagne but you can't say that because 'the frogs go mental, they're so excitable'. (Peter is Italian but his mother is British so he speaks in a British accent) and the second thing is that it should tell you the year that it was produced, which not all proseccos do. There are over 1000 grape varietals in Italy, which thrive because of the way they are grown on terraces, to give it a scale there are 16 in France.
The olive oil he is serving tonight he has in a big vat (picture later) which is pressed from a grove that originated in 500AD.
Look at this parmesan! He has a grater that is like our Kitchenaid that grates it up in a jif.
He grows the tomatoes, about 5 years ago he was having difficulty finding 'clean' foods so he bought a farm just above Sorrento that was 3 hectares (about 8 acres), but it hadn't been a working farm for 40 years so it needed to be cleared and tilled 7 times per year before he could start growing last year.
The wild arugula was picked from a farm at the base of Visuvio. Jay isn't a fan of arugula, and this was a strong flavour, and he loved it!
It took him 8 years to source a balsamic that he loved, now he buys exclusively this balsamic directly.
So this appetizer is a slice of the bison topped with parmesan shavings, arugula, olive oil, truffle oil and balsamic and then rolled up. The truffle oil he said can be difficult to find. He bought 15 of what he thought were good quality truffle oils and asked a friend who is a forensic pathologist to analyse them. Not one was pure truffle oil, but the disturbing thing that 13 of them had no truffle oil at all and were petroleum based oils that were scented and had chemicals added to give them truffle oil flavours. The other two were olive and sunflower oil based with about 20% truffle. So he decided to make his own, he pays someone to hunt the truffles with a dog and make truffle oil for him - which he will sell in the little bottles for 10Eu each, he doesn't want to make a profit on it he just wants to sell good product.
He added lemon juice to it and said lemon juice makes it paired with white, the absence of lemon will pair it with red every time. So simple. We all loved the wild arugula and he took our addresses and said he would post us the arugula seeds (in a birthday card so that it isn't stopped by customs).
His home is 5,000 sq ft and when they started to refurbish it for his apartment and his parents they found it was built on a Roman ruin, which could have cost them the house (though the government has to pay them fair market value). Instead they were able to do the refurbishment because there was nothing of significance found.
I can't remember the beginning of the comment that Jay made, but the end of it was "...I'm 42, you know I'm thinning a bit up here" as he runs his fingers over his scalp and Peter goes "Fuck off you're thinning!" (Peter is bald). It was funny, the first of MANY F bombs of the night.
He had a private party last night and they had 'more money than sense' and left shitfaced so he kept the extra wine he had bought, which they had paid for. He said "Its fucking insane, you're going to love it".
The Burrata below is from Puglia. There is a family that owns 400 hectares and has 300 cattle to roam free. After 3-4 months the calfs are separated from their mothers, but the mothers are still producing milk so they're taught how to enter the milking station and there is a scratching post and feed and the milkers are laser guided. They had to start tagging the heifers ears to ensure they didn't go in to get milked more than 2 times per day. But this way the milk isn't stressed, its full and flavourful.
So we have toast, which is a certain kind of toast, I can't remember what but people who are gluten intolerant can have it. Then I said "What type of cheese is that?" Its butter...wow, ok, no wonder it was delicious he layered the butter about 1/4" thick. Then the burrata and don't be stingy. Then a prosciutto that is from black pigs raised free range which is cured between 26 and 30 months in a grotto, the fungal properties in the grotto create structural changes in the meat which naturally turns to fructose during the curing process which makes it sweet (by this time I'm hammered, so ignore me if I don't make sense). Then a little arugula and balsamic on top and its to die for.
We go out onto the terrace to enjoy a glass of wine and the appetizer while Peter and Stepan tidy up our mess and get ready for the next course. Sarah is so happy, I'm so glad that we did the cooking class, it was on her travel bucket list. I said to her 'why were you so quick to say we didn't need to do it? Its the only thing you wanted to do'. I'm glad we did it - I think all of us agree its one of our favourite experiences of the trip. As we're sitting outside discussing how much we're loving it I said "it would be worth the price of a cab ride to have Peter get shitfaced with us" and we all agreed so he came out to have some wine with us!
When we come back in its time to make pasta!
The fresh pasta is coated with rice flour which stops it from sticking together but doesn't change the integrity of the pasta at all because it flakes off. We chopped basil and tomatoes and Peter used his parmesan grating gizmo. He salted the tomatoes and added some garlic in with them.
How he made the pasta was he threw it in the pot and put a kettle on to boil. He turned the gas heat up on the pot, with the pasta inside bringing the pan up to temperature then he added the boiling water from the kettle. Otherwise when you add pasta to boiling water it lowers the temperature and then the pasta gets that gluey texture. He also doesn't cook with oil, he does everything without oil and adds oil as a finisher, always. It preserves the nutrients in the oil. He'll use lard instead, which he makes by dissolving fat from the butcher and straining it through cheese cloth.
He said to get Jason to stir because he's so strong. I teased "Oh Jason you're so strong, you're my number one stirrer from now on".
He said don't skimp on the cheese, "it shits me to tears when people do that". lol
Delicious!!
We take (lol, I just noticed Anthony's hand!) our pasta again out onto the terrace and Peter joins us. As we're chatting to us he says he'll take us down to his wine cellar
Peter has approx. 5000 bottles in his cellar and an off site cellar as well. He's also a sommelier and asked us what wine's we prefer at home (California Cab Sauv) and whether they were dry or smooth (smooth) and picked a red wine based on that for us to start with. He'll ship wine to Canada labelled as olive oil so that it passes through customs without duties :) He'll also DHL next day service any cheese, prosciutto or fresh ingredients you want.
Down in the cellar he was talking about his wine and said "I don't mean to sound pretentious.." I interrupted and said "then lose the accent" lol..."How the fuck am I supposed to do that?!" He was so much fun.
Below is his vat of olive oil. He said he went through 6 tonnes this year (but their tonne is different from ours and he meant 600 kilos which is 6 vats like this one).
The boys spent a very long time looking through his scotch collection. Jay said when he comes to Canada they'll introduce him to their scotch - he said "I think we'll go to jail! I picture the mounted police chasing us down the street in the snow". Jay said "While we're dodging flying hockey pucks".
He said if we come back through the winter with the family that he has 3 apartments that are empty all season and he'll do a bigger event and open some really nice scotch he has with the boys. He has a visual memory so knows where everything is, but its end of summer now so the cellar is in a bit of chaos.
He said that the wine and scotch is about sharing in a part of the adventure which is existing. Sharing it with people on the same page with the same values and loves. There are several people in our lives who qualify in this category and we wish Steve and Julia could have made it this trip with us. My Mom would absolutely have loved this class and Sarah and Anthony talked about Marcia and Jay as well. If we do get him to come to Canada it would end up being a pretty big group, he's in New York in Feb so we're seriously considering it!
Jay thought this was funny what Peter had written on the bottle of Makers Mark.
Peter said "Let's get another wine!" (earlier he said not to drink water, too much water can kill you...unfortunately we listened to him - actually I found in my notes his actual words were "water fucks you up, you can die from too much water the worst that too much wine can do is make you pass out on the beach") Sarah said "Amazeballs!" and he cracked up and said "I love it, it reminds me of South Park and the chocolate salty balls".
This ribeye isn't very marbled, he said it comes from happy cows, they're clean, reared in the wild, they eat grass and they walk and they work off their calories naturally. Marbling, in his opinion, is bad, it means they don't have enough space to roam. Grain fed is terrible, it expands in the gut and doesn't allow the cattle to digest properly. He said you're not what you eat, you're what you absorb because half or more of what we ingest isn't absorbed properly or effectively. He only buys grass fed, not grass finished beef.
Peter makes is own lard by getting trimmings at the butcher and melting it down and straining it through a coffee filter or cheese cloth.
This is marrow below, it smelled nutty. The marrow fat contains fidonutrients. Butter has a week carbohydrate chain, you have to help it out of it will burn. Butter and lard will bond and allow it not to burn.
The last here is like a marrow jelly consistency, its marrow and the 'holy trinity' of shallots, carrots and celery, you reduce it to a third and it smells like bouillon. The vegetable mass is what thickens the marrow.
Look at all that butter, lard, marrow and then the bouillon.
He brought it to a boil and set it on the cutting board while the ribeye was cooking on the griddle and added the parsley as soon as it stopped bubbling because otherwise the parsley would get too wilty. Anthony asked Peter what he thought of Su Vide "Su Vide is the death of creation". lol.
We ended up not plating the last dish at all, and Jason hates mushrooms but loved it. We just dipped our meat into the sauce on the table.
It was an amazing night - Sarah teared up at least 3 times she was so happy.
Peter commented that this happens about twice a year with groups, never with Americans (lol), that everything just clicks. He said this is why he does this class and asks us to treat it like we're in our own home, this way he feels like he's always cooking for family and friends.
He arranged for a taxi to take us back to Sorrento, the drive back on the winding roads was a little sketchy. We all went straight to bed and weren't smart enough, or sober enough, to have bought water on the walk back from the taxi stand. This could be bad.
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