Our Trulli stay in Puglia and a cooking class with Veronica

We are awoken to the happy chirp of birds outside our windows and it’s a gorgeous morning for breakfast in the courtyard.

I have regained 35% of my voice so Tanya can hear the occasional thing I say now. We decide that’s it’s so comfortable here that just having a relaxing day looking out to the olive groves and surrounding Trulli is just what the doctor ordered, also we need to save energy for the big gastronomic effort this evening of a cooking class.

Veronica who is Anna’s sister gets us at 4.15pm and so begins a whole Puglian culinary adventure. We will be making everything from scratch the menu supplied with ingredients straight from Veronica’s parent’s garden. We start with making the focaccia dough and setting it to rise.

Then the eggplant parmigiana, a specialty of this area. Little towers of eggplant layered with our freshly made tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and a sprinkling of Parmesan as well.

These two bake eventually in the oven.

We then make the semolina dough for the pasta, here they are made into orecchiette. Tanya and I trying to get the press with the thumb, the flick of the index finger and the 45 degree angle on the knife just like Veronica but our little “ear” pasta does have a little more uniqueness to it with variability in shape, size and thickness much more than hers.

Tanya does the initial Mt Vesuvius well and gets a great consistency for the dough.

Usually the pasta gets made the day before and dries over night on special wooden trays, today it will air for a couple of hours before we cook it.

We now prepare the fresh artichoke hearts which get coated in a light beer , tempura batter, the chicory flowers and the fava beans ( broad beans) are lightly boiled. The halved and coated artichoke hearts get lightly deep fried in olive oil.

One more course with a fillet of bream coated in a delicious bread crumb, Parmesan, olive oil crumble with fresh parsley. We combine all the steps to make a large tray of Tiramisu for dessert and we can start to eat.

How we are going to get through this mountain of yummy – ness we are not sure, but we will give it a good go.

A nice glass of white wine for Veronica and Tanya and we start the feast.

We have had so much fun chatting to  Veronika about her life and family as we work our way through the courses, we feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to do this together. Family is a really big part of life here and this particular family seems very close knit. Nice!

Looks like there will be some left overs we think 🙂

Luckily it’s just a 20m tumble down the hill from the kitchen Trulli to our place, so we wobble down and hit our beds instantly.