Days Fly by.

Monday and Tuesday have flown by. Its Tuesday at about 5 pm and tonight is my night to make dinner again so i just got back from the little market where i picked up the last of my supplies. Tonight I'm making shrimp pesto, salad, twice baked potato and garlic bread. Most of my ingredients i bought earlier today at the maket centrale which is the big market that has everything brough in fresh daily and closed at 2 pm. You can eat very well for pretty cheap. The only things that are expensive are the higher grade meats, sea food and good wine and vinegar.

Yesterday in tradition of italian food we made Gnocchi Di Patti (pronounced nocky) which is an easy recipe that all of you can make t home. We topped it with fresh pesto pasta. Its pretty much potato pasta. The ingredients are:
3 potatoes. (using smaller sized yukon golds)
white flour (about 350 grams or 13 oz)
2 egg yolks
nutmeg
salt & pepe

Wash the potatpes and cook the skin in salted water. Be sure not to boil on too high a temp as the potatoes will get torn up. When finished peel the skin off. This next step is really touch so practice a few times before you make it for a meal. After youve peeled the potatoes mash them and add most of the flour. mix with your fingers, touching as little as possible. Add just the yold of 2 eggs, the salt pepe and a pinch of nutmeg. Toss some flour on a board or counter and roll out into pieces (about the size of bread sticks) cut into pieces a little less than an inch. Make lines in the gnocchi with a fork or other object. Bring salted water to a boil and throw the gnocchi in. Soon they will rise to the top, when they have let them cook for another two minutes. Cover with pesto or whatever other sauce and serve hot. If your gnocchi start coming apart when youre rolling it or when you are boiling then you have too much flour. That is the touchy part of the recipe. When the flour to potato ratio is correct they will stay together correctly. Something that I tried and ejoyed was I mixed a little pesto into a couple off the gnocchi rolls before i cut them. Tasted great. After school I went and searched again for stamps. I have not been able to find stamps since i got here but yesterday the third place I went had some. So some of you should have postcards coming. John Scherzer - what is an address at work that I can send mail to you and Shelly? Anyway Yesterday I also recieved my first care package. My dad and Jackie sent me a box with some nice traveling clothes, business cards they made fore me and some Alaskan gifts and postcards to hand out while im here. Very Nice! For some reason here in Italy you have to pay when you recieve gifts. It was 14 euro but it was worth it. After going through my package me and a couple of my roommates headed out to sportsnight. Its a night where there is volleyball and soccer for a couple hours for all the study abroad students from a couple schools. Its at the same place they have basketball so it took about an hour to walk there. Lately at night its been almost like Georgia weather- hot with a thick humidity. After playing volleyball everyone was getting ready to play soccer when Jesse, a girl that goes to the basketball days, told me that if we could see well enough we could play basketball instead. We got the ball and headed over to the court. The lights were coming over from the soccer area but we could see well enough to play. The court was pretty cool, with tall trees overhanging almost like a cieling. Around the out of bounds area there was a tall fence around the whole court, caging it in. There was grafittie that was the artistic kind of grafitti, not the ugly kind along one side, with the arno on the other. It was good to play for a while even tho I forgot my ball and we had to play with a rubber one. On the way back I saw my first lady of the night. All my roommates are from big cities and are used to it but it was kind of weird for me to see a young lady so obviously selling herself. I must have stared by accident because she yelled what mario translated to be "dont look if youve got no money". We got home about 1230am and called it a night.
Up til now today has been mostly all class. At 9am I had introduction to professional cooking. Today we learned about the "base of all cooking" or stocks. We each made either fish, chicken, beef, veal or veggie stock. I made fish. It was pretty easy to make but we learned about all the techniques and variations you can do depending on the meal, # of people and preparation time. After that class I went to the fresh market (ill put some more pics up of that place, its pretty cool) and bout the pesto, bell peppers, prawns and other ingredients for my dinner. Next I had wine appreciation. Today we were learning about the 2nd of the 3 ways to analyze wine. Today is was olfactory. The first wine we had was a reisling. We were taught to first swirl the wine, then take a small sniff to figure out the intensity. The desctiptions for intensity could be: weak, scarcely intense, nearly intense, intense and very intense. Next you swirl again and this time take a big sniff. This is to find the persistence of the aroma. This ranges from short, shortly persistend, nearly persistent, persistent and long persistent. This you can tell by how long the smell stays in your nose. Olfactory quality is judged on whether the first two match up. Say if the intensity is weak and the persistence is long persisten then the quality is course. Quality goes from coarse (bad), scarsely fine, nearly fine, and fine(good) which would be if intensity and persistence were both described with the same prefix. Next we determined the main aroma of the wine. There was flowers, fruits, dried fruits and nuts, herbs, spices, toasted thngs, animal aromas, and other aromas to choose from. For example tulip with undertones of apple. Things like that. Ill try to put more pics up tonight after dinner.
Oh yea, last but not least. The pics from my sisters wedding pinally were posted online. They're amazing (http://unboundclients.com/mbriedel/) Looking at them gave me a great feeling. That was a beautiful wedding and a great day. My sister that i love and have looked up to my whole life married a very good man who has befriended me since the first time I met him. I think I might have been a little under the influence as it looks like I was in that picture booth alot more than anyone else.