For the first few weeks of study abroad, none of us were really cooking. We were eating out, grabbing things nearby, and just kind of surviving. The kitchen in our apartment sat mostly untouched. It is not that we didn’t want to cook, it just never really happened. Everyone was busy, no one wanted to plan it, and going out was always easier.
That changed when our Social Media and Food class took us all to a cooking class together at Giglio Cooking School. It was the first time we had actually been in a kitchen as a group and it was so fun. Something about standing around a cutting board with people you live with, all slightly unsure of what you are doing, makes everything feel more relaxed. We were laughing almost immediately.
We made handmade pasta, a homemade tomato sauce, sautéed vegetables, and Pollo alla Cacciatora, which is a rustic braised chicken dish with tomatoes, olives, and wine. Our instructor walked us through everything, including how to shape pasta, which sounds simple but requires more patience than expected. By the end we were sitting around a table eating a meal we had made ourselves and it was one of the best nights of the semester.
Eventually we decided we wanted to try recreating the cooking class meal ourselves. We went to Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio for fresh produce and stopped into a small butcher shop right by our apartment for the chicken. If you have not been to visit the Sant’Ambrogio Market and surrounding neighborhood yet, it is worth going out of your way for. We picked up tomatoes, herbs, and vegetables from a few different stalls and started to feel like we knew what we were doing, even if we were definitely figuring it out as we went. We used the recipe from our cooking class as a guide and added our own takes where we felt confident enough to.
We made a lot of mistakes. The pasta came out thick and uneven. The sauce got over-salted, then over-corrected with so much pasta water we were worried we’d ruined it entirely. Someone squirted lemon juice directly into their eye and spent a solid few minutes at the sink. The chicken took much longer than expected, and at one point we had a genuine conversation about whether to just eat the pasta on its own and wait for the chicken separately. We didn’t, but it was a real debate that lasted longer than it probably should have, mostly because we were all extremely hungry by that point.
The meal was actually really good. We sat down, opened some wine, and ate everything family-style. The Chicken Cacciatore came out better than we expected despite the delay, the handmade pasta had great texture even if no two pieces looked the same, and the sauce was completely fine once we stopped panicking about it. We laughed a lot about everything that went wrong, which honestly made the whole thing more enjoyable than if it had all gone smoothly.
Cooking ended up being one of our favorite parts of living here, which is not something any of us expected going in. The class reminded us it was actually worth the effort, and doing the market run beforehand made it feel like something real rather than just following a recipe on our phones. If you are studying abroad and your kitchen is sitting there unused, find an excuse to use it. It does not have to be a big production. It just has to happen.
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Written by: Lucy Bonadeo , Sarah Burns , Kathryn Ullmann , Zoie Turner, Anika Field