What does a typical day look like on a cooking vacation in Norcia?
| Title: | What does a typical day look like on a cooking vacation in Norcia? | |||||||
| Category: | Expectations & Planning for Our Norcia Vacations | |||||||
| Author: | Alyssa Saltzman | Updated: | Jan 30, 2019 | Views: | 4,628 | |||
| Tags: | vacation in umbria vacation in norcia where to go on vacation in umbria vacation for people that want to cook | |||||||
Each day you will have a meeting time in the morning. You will get ready and walk down to the Vespasia restaurant, 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 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 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 Casa Bianconi for the class.
When you are at Casa Bianconi 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, 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 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 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 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 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 head off to a winery, or go make some fresh ricotta cheese. We may visit local monks, or spend an afternoon in Assisi. Whatever the day's itinerary calls for.
If we had a morning cooking class, we won't venture too far. We all load up into the van 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. 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 Norcia for dinner or return to Norcia 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.