Laura Rector

Travel isn’t always pretty. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

But, if this is just one trip in a long series of life adventures, I just look at my return as an embrace of all the things I love until a future brief separation from these things. Even though it means a 4 hour bus trip from Abruzzo to Rome, 6 hours waiting for my flight from Rome to London, an overnight in London, an 8 hour flight to Chicago, a trip through customs reclaiming of my bag, a 3 hour ORD layover and an hour flight home I admit, I do like to see a piece of my adventures in my home, to take a minute from time-to-time to remember the trip, the people and the experiences, and then move on with my day. What I do plan to do is to bring a little of Italy home with me in the way of cooking a feast from all I learned, with some of the unique spices and cheeses

This was a great experience and I encourage everyone to look up edible destinations. It’s a perfect holiday. FYI- if you want to take one of these trips they run 2 for 1 specials every so often so look into it. This trip was 8 days of travel and instruction which included all your gourmet 3 course meals, transfers, hotel accommodations and all the wine you can drink for about $2000.

It wasn’t a rushed day, I got two days worth of sleep in one night and it was filled with many of my favorite things- cooking, eating, shopping, a massage, wine tasting, hanging out with interesting people and we capped off with more eating. We did drop a bouquet garnet of spices, Thyme, Rosemary and Sage, in the mixture of olive oil, carrots, celery, onion, wine, salt, pork sausage and pancetta. A couple of useful ‘things’ and cooking tips I learned today: The difference between a meat sauce and a ragu— in a meat sauce the focus is on the tomatoes and in a ragu sauce, the focus is on the meat. And lastly, be generous with the oil olive because the pasta will absorb all the oil and if you are not generous enough with the oil the pasta will be tough.