Don Genova's Blog

If I look a little overwhelmed it’s because yesterday was overwhelming!  I met 22 new classmates, as well as teaching and administration staff at the University.

I also discovered that I am one of the worst Italian speakers in the class, so I am going to have to work hard to catch up.  We ate lunch for the first time at the cooking school, and it was a strange mix of either plated food, or a buffet, or both?  There was a sort of cabbage stew with various sausages and ribs and…cow’s muzzle.  I had seen this part of the cow before on sale at the central market in Florence, but never thought it would be the first odd thing I would try on this sojourn to Italy!

It was soft and gelatinous with a bit of meat clinging to the inside….which would probably be the cheek, which I do enjoy eating.  The muzzle had a very mild flavour, wasn’t slimy, and reminded me a bit of the tendon you get in Vietnamese or Chinese soups.  Will I eat it again?  Sure, why not.

This is the view from one of our classrooms of the park behind the ducal palace.  Wow!  But there will be no time to daydream, I’m afraid.

Our class is made up of students from all over the world.  The largest group is American, so later tonight we will celebrate US Thanksgiving along with the students in the other Master class, the one studying more Gastronomy than Culture.  But there are 3 Canadians, with Austria, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Taiwan and Spain also represented.  Just six men, the rest are women.

My roommate Andy and I hosted a big ‘first day of class’ bash last night, as it had fallen to us to continue the tradition begun last year in this large apartment.  Before I knew it Marta and Marie-Josee were cooking pasta dishes in the kitchen and we were nibbling on different cheeses, cured meats, olives and yes, even potato chips.

Almost everyone came and we ate and drank and chatted boisterously until the folks who live in Parma figured it was about time to share cabs back home.  Tonight it’s turkey for dinner!

As many of you have heard, I have left Canada behind for much of the next year to attend a Masters of Food Culture program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences near Parma, Italy.  The photo to the left shows the Ducal Palace of Colorno, which houses the Colorno campus of the university, along with a cooking school which will be providing our lunches every day we are in class!

Colorno is about a 20-minute drive from Parma, and my apartment is about a 10-minute walk from class.  It’s a clean and spacious 2-bedroom on the third floor, and my roommate Andy Chou just arrived after traveling 24 hours from Taipei, Taiwan.  Turns out he is also a food journalist!

The weather here is very Vancouver-like, minus the floods and windstorms, overcast, damp and mild.  Any sort of colour really stands out, like the fallen leaves from a tree just down the street, or my neighbour’s healthy looking winter greens vibrantly glowing in her backyard.                                                   

Classes don’t officially start until tomorrow morning with a welcome session and our first Italian lessons.  Looking forward to meeting the rest of my classmates (25 in total) to see what kind of group dynamic we develop…since we will be spending so much time together over the next few months. 

So this morning I found out the weekly market takes place on Tuesdays and off I ambled to the piazza right in front of the ducal palace.  Picked up a huge bulb of fennel because it looked so good, some very sweet oranges and a couple of large cotechino sausages.  I thought I would try to replicate a dish I had at Salumi in Seattle earlier this year, lentils and cotechino, as the previous occupant of this apartment (thanks, David!) had left me some tiny mountain lentils to try.  So, fry the sausage, take out of the pan, add some onions and garlic, soften, add the lentils and water, salt and pepper, simmer, add the sliced sausage, right?  Wrong!

I should have boiled or simmered the sausages in water first, pricking them to release the fat and allow them to firm up.  Instead, they burst apart and globules of fat started exploding like gunfire in the frypan!  Andy called out from his room, ‘everything okay in there?’  I was a little embarassed but recovered by crumbling the sausage and throwing it into the lentil and onion mix.  Second mistake:  Adding salt.  This dish turned out way too salty, but I gobbled down some anyway, and Andy bravely tried some as well.  Tomorrow I will add some boiled potatoes to the mix and they should absorb some of the salt.  Next time I’ll look up a recipe before I start cooking!  Andiamo, let’s go to class!