4- course seafood dinner at Ganzo!

On  Thursday, June 9th me and a group of my friends ate at Ganzo (the restuarant we work at)!  It was the 4 course meal night that they do every Thursday but with a different theme!  The night we went was seafood night!  We had salmon salad, octopus with peppers and potaties, clam and zuccini risotto, fried shrimp, octopus, cod and calamari.  For dessert we had peach sorbet with fresh peaches and a sugar cookie!  It was very interesting to try everything but good!  Along with the meal you get a different type of wine with every course!  We had white wine, red wine, sparkling wine and dessert wine!

Duomo Di Firenze

On Thursday, June 9th a small group of my girlfriends and I paid for a guided english tour of the Duomo!  This is a famous cathedral in Florence, Italy!  It was incredible and huge!  We got to climb to the very top as well!  The tour took about an hour and a half!  We climbed a totaly of 450 stairs!  The weather was perfect and the view was gorgeous at the top....but scary because we were so high up!  The only way to get to the top of the Duoma is by stairs and you get back down on the same staircase!  It was very fun and we felt accomplished when we made it to the top!  It is the tallest building in Florence so you could see everything from the top!

Wine Tasting Class

This was our first week of the wine portion!  We have wine lab for 2 1/2 hours everyday!  In lab, we test 3 different wines from a certain region in Italy!  Along with the wine we pair it with different types of Italian food! We have to do a wine analysis for each wine we taste test!  This includes the aromas, color, structure, consistency, intensity and much more!  We usually get a wide variety of white wine, red wine and sparkling wines!  It is very hard to anaylize wine!  Above are some of the different wines I have tasted this week! 

New Apartment!

Here are pictures of our new apartment! We moved in on Friday! There is a total of 7 girls living in it!   There are 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms! My room is the one with 3 twin size beds in it! Shannon, Brigitte and I all share a room and then the other 4 roommates get there own!  It is nice, but far from everyone else!  Our roommates are from Chicago, Wisconsin and Colorado!  We are all living in this new apartment for a little less then 3 weeks!

Montepulciano, Italy

Our last stop on Saturday was a small Renaissance town called Montepuciano.  This is where New Moon was filmed! These are the building that you may or may not recognize from the movie!  Here we walked around and ate cannoli's! 

Azienda Agricola Bindella (Montepuciano)

These are pictures from Saturday, June 4th as well!  We went to a winery in Vallocaia, Montepuciano.  Here we got to visit the cellars, wine tasting and lunch!  This farm produces over 120,000 bottles of wine per year! 

Pienza, Italy

On Saturday, June 4th we went to Pienza, Italy which is a small Renaissance town!  We got to see the duoma, shop and sample different foods!  They are also famous for its pecorino cheese which we got to sample!

WSU farewell dinner

Thursday night was our final dinner!  We had to cook for over 40 guests at $28.00 a plate!  It was a 5 course meal and we created the entire menu and did everything for it! There was 30 of us who planned it and did it!  We got an A of course! It went really well!  My job was serving and bussing!  I loved it!  All the guests loved the food!

Piazzale Michelangelo

On Tuesday after class, some girls and I went across the Ponte Vecchio and picked up pizza and wine.  We hiked up to the top of Piazzale Michelangelo and ate and drank and looked out onto this gorgeous view!  It is a very famous spot in Florence because you can see the entire city and watch the sun set!!

Final week of culinary lab

These were the final recipes I made this week! It was our last week of culinary lab!  We made tiramisu, cannoli's, lasagna, panna cota, cod, cheese eggplants and tomatoe sauce.