Cooking class!

(This is part of our series of posts from our six-week Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip to Italy in Spring 2025. We have an index to all the posts from that trip here.)

A photo from Cheryl’s “Survival Italian” class, which is taught through the ABC School Firenze but, unlike the “classical” course that I’m taking, was created specifically for Road Scholar. She and her classmates (more than half our group is in that class) just adore their teacher Serena, who is engaging and entertaining. Here, Serena was asking Maggie (age 85) to tell about the Italian boyfriends she had when she was younger.

After our language classes this morning, we traveled to the home of Chef Donatella on the east side of Florence for a hands-on Italian cooking class (part of our Road Scholar curriculum). It was informative, entertaining, and SO much fun, and at the end we got to eat what we’d made!

At Chef Donatella’s home, we and our classmates Tom and Nancy started out by making pasta. We began by mixing egg and semolina flour.

We added cocoa powder for color, and then used bench scrapers to chop up the dough, evenly distributing the egg throughout the mixture.

After mixing, we kneaded the dough until it was elastic and pliable, adding water a few drops at a time to get the right consistency.

While the pasta dough rested, we made tiramisu for our dessert. Donatella explained why real tiramisu is made exclusively with quality mascarpone cheese.

We each got a taste of the cheese (creamy deliciousness on its own), and then began work on the tiramisu filling. We separated eggs and mixed the yolks with the mascarpone cheese, sugar, and freshly grated nutmeg.

Cheryl mixing the tiramisu filling. It required quite a lot of work to get all the egg yolk incorporated into the cheese. It was the most cooking Cheryl has done in a while!

With the filling made, Donatella demonstrated how to assemble a classic-style tiramisu, dusting a bowl with cocoa, dipping lady fingers in coffee and then layering them with the mascarpone filling.

Cheryl made sure her tiramisu had a little extra chocolate.

We topped the tiramisu with chocolate chips and more cocoa powder.

We learned that tiramisu can be made with many different flavors. Donatella offered for us to make a lemon tiramisu, and I took her up on it. For this one, I sprinkled limoncello liberally on the ladyfingers in the bowl, layered on the filling, and topped it with finely grated lemon zest and a lemon slice.

I almost couldn’t wait to eat the lemon tiramisu, but we still had more cooking to do before dinner.

Our group with our tiramisu desserts.

Cheryl mixing ricotta cheese, arugula and salt to fill the rose-shaped ravioli we would soon be making.

Donatella taught us how to use a pasta machine to roll out the pasta dough into progressively thinner sheets.

Then Donatella demonstrated how to create the rose-shaped ravioli, by sticking four circles of pasta together, adding a little filling, folding the whole thing in half lengthwise, and rolling it up.

The result is a beautiful rose-shaped ravioli!

My first attempt at making the ravioli came out pretty well.

Then we took to rolling, cutting, assembling and filling a lot more ravioli.

Here you can see what the ravioli looks like right after it’s filled and folded, but before it’s rolled up into the rose shape.

Cranking the pasta machine.

Adding the filling.

After we’d made enough rose-shaped ravioli, we rolled out the remaining dough scraps and cut it into irregular shapes to make a pasta known as maltagliati – literally, “poorly cut”.

David with the finished tray of pasta, ready for boiling.

We sat down at Donatella’s colorful table and enjoyed some chianti while she cooked the pasta and sauced it. Then it was finally time to eat! (The other woman in the photo is one of our ABC School teachers, Silvia, who was our Road Scholar host for this excursion.)

Donatella served the rose-shaped ravioli in a pesto sauce with fresh arugula.

And then we had the maltagliati in a cream sauce with lots of cheese. The tiramisu was delicious for dessert but that disappeared before anyone got a photo.

Enjoying the dinner that we made together. Such a fun evening!