** How to Enjoy Your Your Italian Cooking Vacation (Free Italy Travel Advice)**
You're off to Italy on a cooking school tour you've been dreaming of
for years, perhaps in the magnificent Barolo
wine country in Piedmont
or on the east coast in
Sicily with views of the
Mediterranean and snow capped Mount
Etna. You want to enjoy your
sensual experiences to the maximum: the beauty, the countryside, food,
cooking lessons, wine tasting, sightseeing and visits with locals. Here
are some tips on getting all the joy possible out of your Italian
cooking vacation, gleaned from
my 12 years of experience creating and leading cooking tours in Italy:
Assert
yourself in the kitchen.
Some cooking school
participants say, "The cooking classes were hands-on but I didn't get
enough time to cook hands-on during the lesson. The chef did too much
of the cooking in the class."
If you want to participate more
hands-on in the class, get beside the chef and jump right in. If you
hang back, waiting to get asked to do something, you may wait awhile
and go away feeling disappointed you didn't get a real hands-on class.
Some tour guides and chefs notice who is shy and hanging back in the
kitchen and encourage them to "step up to the plate", but others don't.
You have to be assertive and volunteer.
Pace
yourself at the table.
Many participants tell me,
"I've eaten too
much! There's too much food. I'm a food lover so how can I discipline
myself when everything is SO delicious."
Find out what is on your lunch
or dinner menu (a good guide should provide you with a listing of
dishes before each meal) so you can pace yourself. That way you avoid
eating a lot of one course only to find three more courses are coming
and you don't
have room for all the wonderful food.
Most Italian meals for special
occasions (all cooking school meals are special occasions) have five
courses: one to five appetizers, pasta or rice plate, meat or fish
plate, vegetable side dish and dessert; so pacing yourself makes a big
difference in your enjoyment of your food experiences.
Sample a little bit of
everything so you experience as many flavors and dishes as possible.
This will also avoid offending your hospitable cooking teachers or
chefs. Then you can smile and say, "It was absolutely wonderful, but I
just don't have the space."
Stay
active.
Some cooking school students
wonder, "Will I gain weight during my cooking tour with the vast
quantities of irresistible food?"
One woman told me she lost 10
pounds during her cooking trip in Italy. No fried chicken or
hamburgers, just healthy, natural, less fatty foods. Italians eat less
junk food and more fresh, local foods than many North Americans. She
drank water and no soda. She did much more walking than she ever does
at home.
If you can find time on your
cooking school tour to go for walks or hikes, you'll go home weighing
the same or less, and feel much more energetic while on your cooking
tour.
Better still, choose cooking
school tours that include some good walks perhaps along paths in the
Tuscan or Piedmont wine country or along coasts in Cinque
Terre, the
Amalfi Coast or Sicily.
Communicate
with your guide.
Once you're in Italy in the
middle of experiencing your cooking school tour, you may want to change
the tour itinerary slightly. For example, you discover many tempting
leather shops in a Tuscan hill town and want to spend more time
shopping and forego your spa treatments on the itinerary. Ask your tour
guide how you can change activities. Most tour guides try to be as
flexible as possible. If you're enjoying an activity tremendously, ask
your guide how you can do more of it.
If there's anything you're not
enjoying on your tour or at the cooking school, take your guide or
instructor aside, give constructive, friendly feedback and work
together to make changes. Don't be like some people who say nothing
about their disappointments until they fill out the tour evaluation
form at the end of the vacation when it's too late to help them.
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