International Festival

We learned today that there is an international festival going on in Piazza Santa Croce, so we checked it out! It was really cool, lots of booths with food, desserts, and other goods from different countries:

Germany! The food smelled delicious

Chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine

We went to another church for Intro to Renaissance Art today:

Crudo

No, I don't mean crudo as in crude. What I am talking about is the Italian version of Japanese sashimi. It's pretty interesting, and I've never heard about it before. Raw fish with a delicate balance of fat (olive oil), acid (lemon juice or vinegar), salt and spices. Another chef, B. Becht, even invented Italian Sushi, which is different because it is little, artistic versions of any traditional Italian dishes. However, this trend never really caught on in Italy, but apparently it is popular in Japan (John?).

These concepts work so well because Italian and Japanese cuisine are actually similar, despite being so different. They both focus on the taste of natural ingredients in dishes, and Italians are extremely particular about their ingredients. They get the freshest fruits, vegetables, meats, and cheeses because having good ingredients is 80% of the cooking (at least). The dishes we have for dinner are all homemade (check out the album Kristen put up on Facebook: A tavola) and simple, but delicious because the tomatoes, for starters, are amazing! That is why there are so many markets around here, for people to get local-grown produce so often. Italians generally do their grocery shopping pretty often. Milk is sold in much smaller containers than I'm used to, only 1 liter. At the supermarkets, the milk sometimes isn't even kept refrigerated because they go through them so fast, which still seems bizarre to me.

Well, I put up 4 more recipes from cooking class on Monday as usual, but I also added a rating for each dish so you can see what I thought about it. I hope you find it helpful!

Caitlin
  

Hiking in the Florentine Hills

I was exhausted yesterday because Kristen and I did a 10 mile hike through the Florentine Hills that afternoon in about 4 hours. Definitely worth it. We saw some beautiful views that we wouldn't have otherwise and got an awesome workout (I'm a bit sore today). Luckily, it did not rain during our hike because up until the day before, the forecast was rain all day. It did rain before the hike some though, so our shoes got caked in mud at one point. They felt like weights.

We took a bus up north to get to the starting point (Piazzale Michelangelo is on the other side of Florence for reference). Then, we walked up some roads and started on the trails. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking: