First Full Day at Anna Tasca Lanza

Our first full day at Anna Tasca Lanza began with breakfast. We had cake, coffee, tea, yogurt made on the farm and a fruit called lowquats. 

After breakfast, we went for a garden tour with Mia, who is a gardener and beekeeper (although the farm has its own bee keeper). She showed us the different trees and plants in the English Tea garden, and then the vegetable raised beds along the pool. (After lunch, we got a tour of the full vegetable garden behind the villa). You can tell that our group’s love of food extends to plants and gardening and we all had a great time. 

After the garden tour, we started our cooking lesson with Kyle. We started making pasta dough with durum flour and water (no eggs). My dough came together quickly but wasn’t the right consistency for a while. While the pasta dough was resting, we made a chickpea flour batter. After the batter was cooked on the stove briefly, we spread it on plates to dry. From there, we started our dessert. We mixed milk, sugar, bitter almonds,  lemon zest and cornstarch in a pot and mixed it until it boiled very briefly, strained it then poured it into wine glasses with bitter orange marmalade to set. The last dish we prepared were stuffed beef rolls. We made a mixture of cheese, bread crumbs, onions, etc and rolled the mixture into very thinly sliced beef like little burritos or blintzes. We put the beef rolls on skewers with onion petals, bay leaves, and sliced bread. The skewers were then dunked in olive oil and then breadcrumbs before being baked. We then returned to rolling pasta dough into a corkscrew shape which took a while so we also made some orichette which is a bit faster. Kyle then removed the chickpea paste from the plates, cut into triangles and fried them in oil. We sat in the courtyard with wine eating the panelle (chickpea fritters) while the ladies in the kitchen cooked everything. It was all SO good. 

After lunch we used our free time for a garden tour with Kyle and then at 4, we got a ride up the hill to the winery owned by the family for a tour. Our guide, Cornado was very enthusiastic and had been with the company for a very long time. He had studied to be a lawyer but wine was his passion. He brought us through the processing plant and to see the various sized wine barrels where the wine was aging. We of course finished with a wine tasting. 

After the tasting, we all walked back down the hill to the main house for aperitivo and then dinner. We had cheese and a sausage made by the farm using a pig they had raided for the cook the farm program. For dinner, we had pork, potatoes roasted with cheese & breadcrumbs, fresh peas and spinach. We finished dinner with sesame cookies. After 4 rounds of drinking and eating, we were all ready for bed. Our group is getting along really well which is good because we are only 11 plus Luisa & Francesca.