What does a typical day look like on a Soriano cooking holiday?
| Title: | What does a typical day look like on a Soriano cooking holiday? | |||||||
| Category: | Expectations & Planning for Our Soriano Vacations | |||||||
| Author: | Daniele Pintaudi | Updated: | Jan 30, 2019 | Views: | 5,004 | |||
| Tags: | cooking vacation viterbo cooking vacation tuscia cooking vacation soriano cooking holiday viterbo cooking class viterbo | |||||||
Each day you will have a meeting time in the morning. You will get ready and walk down to the town square (it is very close to all of our homes), and we will meet in a coffee bar and pastry shop. You will have a coupon for each morning that is good for a pastry and a beverage (Cappuccino, Espresso, Milk, Tea, Juice, etc.), which makes for a traditional Italian breakfast. Typically everyone in the group arrives around the same time, and we all join up at a table as we have breakfast.
Morning through Lunch
If we will have a morning cooking class:
If we will be having a cooking class in the morning, you will be met at the coffee bar by the person that will be teaching the class. By the second day, we are all close friends. After breakfast, we may do some shopping together, then head down to our villa for the class.
When you are at the villa for class, we all get right to it and start prepping. We'll be there cooking all morning, but it isn't all cooking. While there, we will have many breaks, you can get on the Internet, we'll listen to music, take little walks around the countryside, and do tons of laughing. We may even head across the street to the local farmers and check out their pigs, chickens, etc. As the morning proceeds. a few bottles of wine may make it over from our 90-bottle rack to the kitchen's center island.
Finally, we will have lunch and eat far too much as we discuss each day that there is no way we will eat that much tonight for dinner... yet somehow we always manage to.
If we will not have a morning cooking class:
Since we are not having a morning cooking class, we will be going on an excursion, so you will be met by one of our hosts. After breakfast, we all load up into the bus and head toward our destination. We'll spend the morning according to the schedule, and at around 1:00 PM we will have lunch.
Lunch, while we are on excursions, is usually something quick and light. We may have Porchetta Panini (suckling pig), or a dish of pasta. Sometimes it will be in a restaurant, and sometimes it will be in a lunch cafe. This is always dictated by our schedule since anytime you sit down at a restaurant in Italy, you will be there for a couple hours at least. So if we have a tight schedule that day, we will avoid restaurants and get some panini.
Often lunch is part of the place we are visiting. We may be touring a winery or olive mill, for example, and sit down for lunch with the owners that day.
Afternoon through Dinner
If we will have an afternoon cooking class:
If we have a cooking class planned for the afternoon, we will have stayed fairly local for our morning excursion. We'll usually get to the villa at around 3:30 PM to get started for class. The afternoon classes are similar to the morning classes, except that our wine rack tends to get quite a bit more use during the afternoon/evening classes :-).
We laugh, we drink, we laugh, we cook, we eat, we cook, we laugh, we drink. Get it? After dinner, we will invariably have some after dinner drinks at the table while we talk about how there is no way we can keep eating this much food... but somehow tomorrow we'll find room for it once again!
If we will not have an afternoon cooking class:
If we have no cooking classes at all today, it means we are on one of our bigger daily excursions, and we continue on after lunch. Maybe we'll head off to a winery, or go do some cheese tasting at a pecorino factory in Pienza. If we were in Assisi, we may head over to a ceramics factory in Deruta. Whatever the day's itinerary calls for.
If we had a morning cooking class, we won't venture too far. One of our hosts will be down at the villa after lunch (or likely had lunch with us). We all load up into the bus and head toward our destination. We'll spend the afternoon according to the schedule, and at around 8:00 PM we will have dinner out.
We choose restaurants that are in some way truly special wherever we go. Since this is a cooking and culinary vacation, we try to focus on places that we find to offer the best of whatever the area we are in specializes in, and we always favor farm-to-table establishments. In doing this, most of the menus are set before we get there in order to make sure that you have a variety of different regional dishes throughout the week, but if you have any special desires or needs, we are always happy to accommodate. Even the wines we choose are almost always from local private wineries in the area we happen to be in.
On some non-class evenings, we will not eat in a restaurant. If we have a particularly tight schedule, or if we are at a crowded festival, we will try to accommodate by opting for something quick that allows us to fit everything in. On some weeks, while in the Montepulciano and Pienza areas, we will buy cheeses, salames, and wines while we are out for the day. Then we'll return to the villa in the late evening and all of us work together in the kitchen to make wonderful cheese, fruit, cold cut & wine dinner.
At other times we may be hosted in the home of a local villager where a wonderful dinner is prepared for us.
After Dinner
Unless we are at a festival, we will either be in Soriano for dinner or return to Soriano after dinner. At that point, some guests call it a night, and some will simply hang out in the town piazza for drinks. In the summer months, there is often live entertainment in the main piazza.