FL's mother is upstairs making gnocchi- succulent, soft, sweet gnocchi, with a variety of sauces. FL can hardly contain his excitement (his mother physically shooed him out of the kitchen because he kept eating the gnocchi raw, his lips and beard smeared with flour, a wild glaze over his eyes), and the smells wafting in to the garden from the kitchen are making me light-headed with hunger. As a displacement activity, until this miracle of a lunch is ready, I will blog.



The other afternoon I saw a notice for a cooking class being offered at La Subida, which is, in total, an agrotourismo: there are guest houses to rent, a collection of bed-and-breakfast-style rooms, horses to ride and trails to be walked, two restaurants (one a more casual trattoria, the other an upscale osteria), tennis courts, geese, and a pool. All of this is set on two sides of a beautiful road that cuts through Collio, forests and hills as the backdrop. The osteria is called Sirk, and it is one of the best restaurants in all of Collio. The food is typical for this area- Slovenian/Friulian- yet particular, artsy almost. The chef is renowned, but also local. FL's mother cuts his hair. Though FL and I (and Angela, once!) eat every now and then on the beautiful outdoor patio of the trattoria, the osteria has always been sort of off-limits. The prices for individual dishes are not staggering, but we like our wine, and our desserts, and our appetizers, and we are not silly enough to think that we can go to this place and eat how we want (i.e. as much as we want) without throwing down enough money for a weekend in Paris. I saw the advertisement for this course, and the price (only 15 euro!) and figured that this was my shot.



The experience turned out to be me and a woman from Slovenia sitting on plush white chairs drinking sparkly water, watching the gorgeous chef, named Michele, make us a 3-course meal. Everything he made was so simple, taking less than 10 minutes to put together. All the ingredients were fresh, the eggs, the mushrooms, the deer; I have about a month left in this season to try these recipes at home, a month left of zucchini flowers, of red bell peppers and garden-harvested kren.

His first dish was an antipasto, a salad of fresh shaved apples and Montasio cheese, ribbons of red pepper blanched in butter (butter! THIS MAN USED BUTTER!), and delicate zucchini flowers that puffed up and shimmered when they touched the hot pan. Over the top, fresh kren (Slovenian for horseradish) was grated. The whole dish was both sweet and bitter, savory and spicy. Extremely light, and so very elegant.



The only way to describe the second dish is to say that it was "scrumptious". The kind of scrumptious that makes one was to lick the plate afterward. Clearly, the chef knew this and had planned ahead for such displays of pathetic commonality. He served the dish is a fish bowl, a gorgeous blue glass fish bowl, atop a white porcelain platter, with a long, silver fork capable of reaching the depths (though not, no matter how desperately I tried, the little crevice at the base).



This dish was a pasta similar to a german spatzle: tiny droplets and knobs of pasta made by whipping up eggs and flour and sifting the dough through a colander into simmering water. These noddles were then added to a warm, buttery pan containing sliced porchini mushrooms, paper-thin slivers of zucchini, and shoe-lace-cut bits of zucchini flower. Oregano was sprinkled, and the pasta was ladled into the fish bowls. Over the top, a hard Grana Padano was shaved with a vegetable peeler, and course sea salt was tossed in order to add, as he put it, a crunch in the mouth.

I asked Chef Michele why the two different cheeses, what exactly was the point in serving the first dish with a fresh Montasio (cows milk), and this with an aged Grana (also cows milk). He explained that obviously the tastes were a huge factor, the flavors. The fresh Montasio is very light, milky, and therefore is a soothing backdrop for the other, harsher flavors of the kren, the sour apple, and the butter-heavy red pepper. This pasta dish was all-around softer, so the Grana was what spiked it up.



At least I think this is what he said. It was during this interlude that I was lost in a daydream of me realizing that in my furor to eat every last bite I had gotten my face suction-cupped into the fish bowl. I could picture myself suffocating, eyes bulging, my tongue reaching as far as it could to just get that last...tiny...noodle. Like a dog with it's snout stuck in a tin can. The very real possibility of this, and the consequent mortification (or death) that would follow when they had to call FL to come get me ("your girlfriend suffered severe brain damage due to pasta", and he would so not even be surprised) gave me shivers. I put the bowl down and re-focused my attention on the next demonstration.

Which was: RAW DEER! Or, more elegantly, and in Italian, Dadolata di Cervo.



The deer had been sliced into cubes and kryovaked (spelling? The only option blogger spell-checks offers me is "muckracked", and that can't be right), having been sprinkled with thyme, oregano, black pepper, salt and roughly chopped garlic. After 24 hours, the meat was freed and then pulverized with a table spoon into a gorgeous, red blob. This blob of joy was set atop a bed of shaved fennel (everything's shaved, I know), seasoned with lemon juice and the house balsamic vinegar, and placed on a pretty little china plate.



I don't know what it is, but the sight of raw meat, and knowing that it is there to be eaten raw, makes me feel wild and amorous. Primal, carnal, yet highly sophisticated. The Slovenian woman asked Chef Michele to please only make her a very small portion, and I immediately raised my hand and told him that I would be happy to eat what was left. Just make my blob really big. So he did, and I went into food-coma happy as could be.



I am going to translate and post these recipes in just a bit. Right now FL is chomping at the bit to go upstairs and eat the gnocchi!