My Bologna has a First Name

Making bolognese sauce - the secret

ingredients - milk and wine

With the easy part over and left to simmer for

four hours, on to the hard part - making the

tagliatelle

It seems easy at first until you have an

Italian woman yelling at you that you're combining

too quickly or kneading without the precise motion

This kneading went on for a good hour, where

our teacher reminded us that pasta has a memory

better than an elephant, and however you mistreat

it in the beginning, will be remembered in the end.

Sound familiar
Again, it seems simple to just cut pasta, but

one centimeter in either direction and all of a sudden you

have spaghetti or pappardelle instead of tagliatelle

And finally the end result - a truly delicious

(if arduous) lunch. Absolutely the best

tagliatelle alla bolognese I've ever had

Piazza Maggiore
The view from the Torre Asinelli
Piazza Nettuno, representing the four rivers

of four continents, considered as the symbol

of Bologna. Church fathers were scandalized

by his 'proportions'
Torre Asinelli and Torre Garisenda,

you can't tell in the picture, but Garisenda

is very crooked. So I guess I can skip Pisa

Bologna

Speaking of bologna, you may have noticed that Italy has been in the news a bit lately, or maybe not, but basically Italy is threatening to take down the Euro with its debt crisis and at the helm has been Berlusconi further driving down investor confidence. For the last six months Berlusconi has had a series of setbacks politically, but like a phoenix, has always risen from the ashes. Even with last week's vote of no confidence and the emergency state of the Italian economy, no one really believed he would finally step down - until Saturday (one week ago) night when Italy won the Super Bowl. The riots in Rome around his house included a full blown party with cheering, champagne, and cries for Berlusconi to both go to jail, that he is a loser and a clown, and with an orchestra playing Allelujia. While life from here on out without Berlusconi will probably be less entertaining, it will hopefully mean a better Italy. While working at FAO is a bit of a bubble, there is much sadness and difficulty for the many Italians who can't find work. In some parts of Italy, unemployment has reached 50%. However, while Italy owes more than 125% of its national yearly output, individual Italians are some of the best savers in the world. Now if only all that money under their mattresses could help bail them out of this crisis.

And now back to the meat of this post - This weekend I decided to return to my roots and check out Bologna. For those of you that don't know, my friends in high school said I often smelled like bologna, so I had no fear that I would feel right at home. A few non-meaty facts about my weekend locale - it's home to the oldest university IN THE WORLD (NZed voice) which was started in 1088, it's been voted Italy's most liveable city time and again, and is a quick 2 hour jaunt by train from Rome. Now all that is nice, but what really drew me was the fact that it is also home to tortellini, tortelloni, lasanga, ragu alla bolognese, tagliatelle, and is in a region known for parmesan, prosciutto, butter, and mortadella (Bologna's bologna). I decided that in order to take full advantage of Bologna that I should take a cooking class while I was there - to which all of my Italian friends laughed and said I could just come home and cook with their Mom and they couldn't believe I was PAYING for a cooking class. Well sorry Italian friends but a lot of talk and no meatballs, and my days are numbered. Here are a few highlights from my weekend in my smellsake:

-Making pasta from scratch: Now you know how I've gained a love and appreciation for making things from scratch from my time in both NZed and Italia, but pasta is a beast I hadn't tackled yet, and as you know - when in Rome. It seems relatively easy, simple ingredients, simple process, until you realize how one false move can make you ball of cement. A few secrets I will share from my lesson with you - only rolling with the inside of your palms, never your fingers; never letting the rolling pin lance off the end of the dough; always keeping a perfect circle; and finally kneading it until it is thin enough to read a paper through - so the next time you have 2+ hours on your hands, I would highly recommend it because the taste really is so much better, but maybe that's just satisfaction at what your own hands created. Post pasta boiling, you should toss the pasta in butter so it doesn't greedily soak up all the sauce. And the rest I'll keep to myself, to hopefully impress you at a dinner someday soon

-Too many cooks in the kitchen?: I trolled a lot of websites to find a cooking class, and surprisingly most of them were full, even in a city avoided by tourists and in chilly November. I finally settled on one because a) it was cheaper and b) you not only made pasta and sauce but a dessert(panna cotta). I showed up to a kitchen at a B&B, where I was greeted by the friendly, if strict chef, and three others- 1 french dude and 2 Americans study abroad students. Our teacher started off by surprising us with the fact that the course would be taught in Italian thanks to our two study abroaders (from Harvard) who were eager to "Ma, dai" their way through the course. Frenchie (who bravely did his best with the Italian instruction, but unwisely told the chef he heard spaghetti was from China) was taking the course to impress his girlfriend. My young American compatriots were eager to discuss how I managed to actually land a job in Italy, and then played the name game since we all went to school in Boston. I had to sadly inform them that I graduated almost ten years ago. I was rewarded with their look of incredulity - homemade pasta and youth in one lunch, yes I'll have another serving.

-Table for one: Traveling alone, I've gotten pretty used to eating by myself, and most of the time I find it quite luxurious, except in Italy. In a country known for their food, I wish they could appreciate a simple girl just out to drown her face in the local regional delights - but instead it breaks their heart. I rarely eat out alone in Italy mostly because I know what it will do to them. But traveling to Bologna by myself, I was not going to let Italians emotional complex come in the way of me and tortelloni, or lasagna, or torellini - I came to Bologna to eat. I managed to convince a restaurant to seat me at a table for one, to their utter depression, where I enjoyed my favorite NZed pasttime of eavesdropping (Brits thinking their Italian accent was stellar, and Italians in a love quarrel over someone's second cousin) while joyously placing tortellini stuffed with prosciutto and mortadella in a broth into my grinning cheeks. I only felt bad for a second when I was making the Italians so uncomfortable that they were almost (ALMOST) making me uncomfortable with their sadness and incredulity of someone eating alone. And then I had dessert

Bologna is really an awesome city that I would like to go back to visit. Other than eating and cooking, I spent my days strolling and shopping through the galleries (all the sidewalks are covered in a curved like tunnel/gallery? not sure what the word is in English), enjoying the haunting architecture, and paying my respects to Jesus and the Madonna via a few ancient museums. Bologna has some of the best shopping in Italy, with a range of punk/urban to glamour, with a friendly mix of students and everyday Italians.

My Bologna has a first name - AGAIN