Days 11 through 14: Cooking Class and Our Farewell to Sicily

Community Highlights Europe Days 11 through 14: Cooking Class and Our Farewell to Sicily

For our last full day in Taormina, Christina and I were heading out to learn Sicilian cooking from a professional chef. We walked down to the rendezvous point where other participants were already waiting for our host, Chef Mimmo, to arrive. Chef Mimmo arrived in his casual attire as we were first going shopping for ingredients at the local market. Mimmo gave a quick rundown of how to choose the best ingredients for each of the dishes we were going to make. As we were standing there listening, locals from town were pushing through our crowd to browse the morning's selection, in the corner a mother was taking a break from selling produce and breastfed her baby, and a elderly nun approached the meat counter to pick out some fish. It was a lively scene and a nice glimpse of real life off the touristy path.

Chef Mimmo then lead us to vans that were to take us down to his beach side restaurant. When we arrived, tables were set up for our lesson with bowls, pasta making tools, and ingredients. We put on our aprons and got to work. We started with making our pasta dough. Chef Mimmo's mother was going around checking on our progress, sometimes taking over kneading the dough to the right consistency. Once that part was done, we let the dough rest while we all went to the outdoor patio to enjoy some wine.

After our wine break, we went back to work. Chef Mimmo demonstrated how to make a variety of pasta shapes and we were sent off to try some of our own. After our pasta was made, Mimmo's mother came and collected it all. We then started cutting veggies for the Sicilian version of ratatouille. Then we made a swordfish roll with garlic, olive oil, and oregano. We signed our names on our fish paper so they knew whose was whose after broiling the fish in the oven.

We all sat down outside, poured more glasses of wine, and enjoyed the fruits of our labor. Even with amateur hands at work, the food was superb. We enjoyed our conversations with folks and it was just a very happy and chill vibe eating our pasta by the beach. This was definitely one of the highlights of our grand trip.

Still full from devouring our late lunch, as the entire experience took about 5 hours, we were not really hungry for dinner. So instead, we went out for drinks with a couple of friends we met at the cooking class and enjoyed our last evening in Taormina together.

The next day, we packed up and headed toward our final Sicilian stop, a sleepy beach town called Aspra. I figured for our last full day in Sicily, we could just relax and do nothing but sit around and look at the water. And that is exactly what we did. For lunch we made mortadella and cheese sandwiches and for dinner we made pasta in our AirBnB. Luckily there was a grocery store just down the block where we could get these goodies plus some wine. Aside from my luggage getting lost and the crazy drivers on the road, this was a fun and memorable trip that I am glad I got to enjoy with Christina. I look forward to our next adventure.