What does a typical day look like on a cooking vacation in Chianti?
| Title: | What does a typical day look like on a cooking vacation in Chianti? | |||||||
| Category: | Expectations & Planning for our Chianti Vacations | |||||||
| Author: | Sophie Townsey | Updated: | Jan 30, 2019 | Views: | 4,843 | |||
| Tags: | vacations in chianti vacations in tuscany what to do in chianti cooking vacation in tuscany a day in chianti | |||||||
Each day you will have a meeting time in the morning. You will get ready and walk down to the Palazzo Leopoldo breakfast room, where we will have a beautiful Italian breakfast buffet that is full of just-baked pastries, cookies, yogurt, cereal, etc. Have a Cappuccino, Espresso or tea with all you like as we get ready to start our day.
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 be going on a morning excursion, you will be met by one of our hosts. After breakfast, we all load up into the van and head toward our destination. We'll spend the morning according to the schedule, and at around 1:00 PM we will have lunch.
Sometimes it will be in a restaurant, and sometimes it will be in a lunch cafe. 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 have a cooking class planned for the afternoon, we will have stayed fairly local for our morning excursion. We'll usually get to cooking at around 3:30 PM to get started for class. The afternoon classes are similar to the morning classes, we'll be there cooking all afternoon, but it isn't all cooking. While there, we will have many breaks, you can get on the Internet, we'll listen to music, and do tons of laughing. As the afternoon proceeds, a few bottles of wine will certainly be opened as we have a wonderful time together.
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!
No cooking classes
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 the beautiful Val d'Orcia to visit the Montalcino wineries and try some local cheeses while we visit the little towns of the area, or head to Florence for a food tour. Whatever the day's itinerary calls for.
Dinner
Dinners are usually around 8:00 PM. 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. 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.
After Dinner
Unless we are at a festival, we will either be in Radda for dinner or return to Radda after dinner. At that point, some guests call it a night, and some will simply hang out in one of the town's cafes or bars.