What does a typical day look like on a cooking vacation in Sicily?
| Title: | What does a typical day look like on a cooking vacation in Sicily? | |||||||
| Category: | Expectations & Planning for Our Sicily Island Vacations | |||||||
| Author: | Daniele Pintaudi | Updated: | Jan 30, 2019 | Views: | 4,741 | |||
| Tags: | cooking vacations sicily cooking vacation favignana best cooking vacations sicily cooking class in sicily | |||||||
Each day you will have a meeting time in the morning. As you walk outside your rooms, you will be in a beautiful garden overlooking the sea. There is a kiosk right there with tables. You will find pastries, coffee, tea, etc. for breakfast most mornings. On some mornings we will have breakfasts as the locals do, heading into town early for breakfast at a cafe with our new local friends.
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 breakfast by the person who will be teaching the class. By the second day, we are all close friends. After breakfast, we may do some shopping together, then head to our cooking class.
When you are in 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, and do tons of laughing. As the morning proceeds. a few bottles of wine will certainly be opened as we have a wonderful time together.
Finally, we will have lunch, and eat far too much! Each day we think that there is no way we could possibly eat that much tonight for dinner – yet somehow, we always do.
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 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.
Lunch, while we are on excursions, is usually something quick and light. We may have panini or a dish of pasta. Sometimes it will be in a restaurant, and sometimes it will be in a lunch cafe. Some of our lunches will be on the boat as we are making our way around the islands. 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.
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 cooking at around 3:30 PM to get started for class. The afternoon classes are similar to the morning classes, except that our wine consumption tends to be significantly higher 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 go make some fresh Ricotta cheese or head to the beach for sea urchins. We may visit amazing grottoes or a gorgeous beach. Whatever the day's itinerary calls for.
If we had a morning cooking class, we won't venture too far. We all load up and head toward our destination. We'll spend the afternoon according to the schedule, and at around 8:00 PM we will have dinner.
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. We may have an Italian BBQ on the cliffs overlooking the ocean or be invited to dinner in the home of a local Sicilian fisherman.
After Dinner
Our days are pretty exhausting, so we usually call it a night after dinner. On some evenings, we are in town at night, but others get us to bed at a decent time. Of course, if you don't want to go to bed, we have an open bar on the property, and it is beautiful to the extreme. On one evening, we will really make it a late night, as we head out on a middle-of-the-night fishing trip!