Full Week Classes at the Awaiting Table
Italian Cooking School

We at the Awaiting Table provide a very different type of cooking class in Italy. Our philosophy is simple: you can only learn so much by watching someone ELSE ride a bike. In short, we don't contribute to the fiction that dumping pre-prepped ingredients into a saute pan is really teaching, nor watching it, really learning. And we're far away from the crowds of a typical Tuscany cooking vacation.

By Day Two of a typical week of our cooking school in Lecce, you'll have garlic under your fingernails, semolina flour hand-prints on your apron and maybe a hotspot on the side of your hand from a chef's knife. And your face will probably hurt from laughing so much. By the morning of Day Three you'll be stepping up to use your new Italian to chit-chat in with Simone the vegetable guy, making jam with Sergio in the afternoon and then grilling a sea bass over olive wood coals at night. By Day Four your orrecchiette will suddenly stop looking like mangled row boats. By Day Five you'll no longer feel compelled to follow recipes, and you'll be on your way to cooking in a new way, learning to cook by paying more attention when you eat, enjoying what you're eating more because you cooked it.

In all starts in the market, where the world-famous produce from the sunny south of Italy is at your fingertips. We'll browse beautiful displays of fish that have never been even refrigerated, the clams still squirting, the shrimp still wiggling. Sweet and pulpy tomatoes, suggestive enough to make the pope blush. You'll crunch into bread, hard and crusty outside, dreamy and yellow inside. Depending on your visit, you may get the chance to meet those that help us make our organic house wine, which is as black as sin and twice as tasty. You'll grill lamb, rabbits and chicken, organic meat that has never done time inside plastic wrapped around a styrofoam tray. And working with all these ingredients, you will gain a sober insight into the Salento’s historic poverty, and how this delicious, heart-breaking and inventive cuisine was their means to combat it.

And even in a week we can give you the Italian enough to chitchat with our greengrocer and to greet Antonella, the flirty fish monger. You'll get a sense of our local history—not in dates to remember, but by what you see around you, the sense of the place. You'll learn to see architecture in ways you can’t on slides in darkened lecture rooms. It’s different when you can touch it, walk inside, and have it explained by the descendants of the culture that formed it. Time it right, and you'll pick figs right off our own fig tree, take a basket and set of shears and gather herbs for dinner from our garden. You'll learn to make gelato, we'll eat it together, taking some to Antonio the granita guy. And just as a typical week is never all that typical, together we'll spend an afternoon canning and jarring the season’s bounty, each week, whatever is in season.

Our typical week always changes, whether it's field trips to wine cellars, olive mills or local, dinky food festivals. Maybe it's a street concert, a local folk dance recital for ten year olds, the mayor showing up to give a speech. Often we spend an afternoon in the countryside, at a friend's, grilling under the stars. No two weeks are ever the same but all of them reflect the season you choose to visit.
Sample Week Schedule

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