Cooking Class #2

Last Tuesday Gabby and I did another cooking class with Chef Andrea through the school. He remembered us from the previous class we'd taken, thus making us the center of his jokes, and having us teach the rest of the class how to make pasta. We are the pasta queens at this point basically. Since Chef Andrea goes to the market each morning, he picked ingredients in season and since our last cooking class was over 2 months ago, we learned to make new stuff. We only did three courses today because that's what he normally does, we just got lucky last time. We learned to make, pasta with speck and asparagus, a sicilian style beef and a custard flavored with lemon and fresh strawberries.
The pasta with speck and asparagus was my favorite of the courses probably, although the fresh tomato sauce on the beef would be a close second. I had never had speck before, but it's another cured meat, similar to panchetta or porchetta that is used in carbonara. The pasta was similar to carbonara, especially when you look at the ingredients: - 4 cups flour - 4 eggs - pinch of salt - 1 bunch of wild asparagus - 1 tablespoon of butter - ½ cup of thinly sliced speck - besciamel - parmesan cheese, but the fresh asparagus really added another dimension of freshness and was crisp.
Sadly we don't have time to take another class with our favorite Roman chef, Chef Andrea Consoli, but having the experiences of each of the classes was extremely fun. We now can go back to the United States with some Roman style tips under our belt, considering I fly home 3 weeks from today (seriously, where did this semester go? like seriously though.) For now, back to more paper writing. Easter post soon to come!