la scuola di cucina

My school, The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy is a small, hands-on held in the historic centre of Lecce. You can read more- and even hear me speak a little English in a video- by visiting my school’s site. www.awaitingtable.com

We run our courses all year ’round, closing them for the summers (although on occasion we offer day-courses for those already in the region). In the summer of 2010, I’ll be available for day classes as I’m writing a book and will be working on rewrites all summer.

Our programmes are different.  And not just in location (the fact that we’re not in touristy parts of Italy,  or that we’re in the historical centre, rather than in the classic Tuscan style- a bunch of foreigners isolated off in a villa, however pretty.) I studied the model for a cooking school and recreated it from scratch: how much you cook as a student, how much we interact at the table, how much our school interacts with the community, etc.

Aside from our normal course that features the food, wine and culture of the Salento (check us in Food and Wine’s article on The Best Cooking Schools in Italy,May 2010′s Bon Apettit and Travel and Leisure), we also offer two courses that are very, very close to my heart. It’s personally taken me years to create them, so massive their undertaking. But like I said, these issues are very personal to me, and they will become so for you as well if you take part.

I designed our olive programme to be part tasting panel, part cooking course, part tour of 1,000 year old groves and antique and modern mills, all set in our normal frame work of lots of time in the kitchen and around the table, immersed among locals. Held at the castle south of Lecce, our third annual olive oil course called, The Cook, The Contadino and The Extravirgin breaks new ground in culinary courses, and has never been attempted before on this scale.  Visit here to learn more.

Our third programme, which debuts in October of 2010 is The New Wine school of Southern Italy, an interdisciplinary programme designed to promote the autoctonas grapes of Southern Italy, at a time when foreigners are still unfamiliar with them, yet local producers are ripping them out to plant foreign grapes, believing that that is what the foreign market desires. Here is your chance to play a part in saving grape diversity from yet more anonymous Cabernet and chardonnay, while learning more about a fascinating part of the world, quite literally, grapevines in the middle of the Mediterranean.

My personal commitment to the wine programme is noteworthy, as for the last five years I’ve closed the school for a month each year to travel the south of Italy by bicycle for a month, researching the stunning diversity in autoctonos vines that produce wines like no where else on earth. I’ve also spent the last three years training as a sommelier in the Italian national system.

But of course, like all of courses, the model for our wine course’s teaching methods is always horizontal, learning as peers and friends, rather than being talked at from high. Check out my site to learn more.