Fun Without Boys (Part III)

The last and final weekend without my husband was spent cooking!  And drinking wine!  Probably the best combination there is.  Especially in a place like Italy where both the food and the wine are delightful.

My 2 best gals here, Amy and Maggie joined me for a day at the Ca’Bruzzo winery located about 45 minutes south of Vicenza in the Colli Berici Hills.  What a gorgeous location!  It looked exactly like a family-run winery in Italy should look like.  Aldo and his wife Sara started this organic winery and farm in 1985.  They produce 5 different types of grapes and the Bruzzo’s carry out all aspects of the winemaking personally.  They hand trim the vines and don’t use any irrigation.  The yields are kept low which results in about 20,000 bottles per year.

Every month Sarah and Aldo offer a cooking class in the winery kitchen.  Their friends Uli and Tanja set the menu and teach the class.  After the meal is prepared we eat and wine is paired with each course. 

For our cooking class we were set to make:

Strudel di porri e speck (leeks and ham in a puff pastry)

Gnocchi di patate con salmon e spinaci (gnocchi with smoked salmon and spinach)

Gnocchi with green and white asparagus

Lamb roasted in red wine sauce

Rosemary potatoes

Mousse au chocolat

Without typing out the entire recipes in this blog I’ll just say that everything was delicious!  The pastry was divine.  I love smoked salmon, spinach and asparagus so the gnocchi dishes were wonderful.  The lamb roast was mouth watering.  I did learn a new technique (at least to me) on how to make roasted potatoes.  The small pieces of potato are boiled until they are half done and then they are tossed in the olive oil and rosemary and finished in the oven.  That’s what makes the potatoes soft on the inside and crispy on the outside.  Delicious!  But the star of the show was most definitely the chocolate mousse.  It seriously may be the most delicious, chocolate-y bite of goodness I’ve ever had.  The perfect thing about it was that it wasn’t insanely rich.  The bad part of that though is I could’ve eaten bowl after bowl of it.

The grand finale to the day was the champagne opening demonstration given to us by Aldo.  The champagne is stored upside down to allow for the sediment to settle at the top of the bottle.  Aldo opened the champagne upside down into a bucket to let the sediment out of the bottle.  It sure takes some skill to allow the sediment out of the bottle but then stopping it so the champagne is saved.  Of course it was delicious and the perfect complement to the chocolate mousse.