By Jay Martini (jnm123)
For my 30th wedding anniversary, I wanted to prove that there was more to the planet than New York City or Las Vegas. I wanted to bust preconceptions and welcome the unexpected.
So my wife and I did Italy – or, more specifically, as much of Italy as one can do in eight days. For years, I had been regaled with stories from friends and business colleagues about the history, the paintings, the cathedrals, the sculptures, but mostly the food. The food! My goodness, the way they went on about what they consumed over there, I enviously began to think that some new series of tastes and flavors had been discovered. And while I thought I was a pretty decent cook of all things Italian, I had always wondered what was lost in the translation from there to here. So, we wanted the focus of the trip to be a couple of cooking classes.
After exploring websites and finding guided culinary adventures online, my wife and I eventually decided – with a certain amount of trepidation – to go it alone. We chose, for our first class, the exotic semi-tropical island of Sicily. And then we chose a second class in Chianti, the better to experience diverse regional cooking within the same country.