cooking classes

Savor Truffles, Olives and More During Umbria's Harvest

Attention Italian food lovers: this is a tour that you're not going to want to miss. This November, Dream of Italy is offering a six-night tour of Umbria during harvest time. The itinerary includes truffle hunting (with truffle dogs), followed by a truffle dinner, a tour of an olive meal to watch olives being pressed into olive oil, pizza and pasta making classes, as well as tours of Perugia and Assisi to fill up your time in between meals.

To add to the harvest vibe, accommodations are at a 17th century farm house, La Fattoria del Gelso, near Assisi, pictured above. This is now a proper hotel villa, but it's also still a working farm -- they grow the region's famous Cannara onions.

The tour cost, excluded airfare is $2,450 per person, based on double occupancy; the trip runs from November 6th-12th.

Tags: cooking classes, hotel deals, italian travel, italy, luxury travel, olive oil, truffles

Dining Like Alexander the Great

by Amy Cortese (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Dining, Events, Art

Our little group attracted curious stares and a hanger-on or two as we made our way through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's hallowed halls. Maybe that was because at each stop, be it a frescoed fragment of an ancient palace, a Bodhisattva statue, or an ornate mummy, the discussion turned quickly to food: the rice and sour cherries served at a palace feast at Persepolis; the exotic fruits and spices of India; the culinary treats buried with those ancient foodies, the Egyptian Pharaohs. A stomach growled amid the din.

Then again, this was no conventional museum tour. This was Artbites.

The brainchild of Maite Gomez-Rejón, a trained chef and historian and our guide that evening, Artbites melds art, history and cuisine through classes that combine museum trips with hands-on cooking instruction. Gomez-Rejon's subjects range from the Aztecs to Leonardo da Vinci (who knew he was a vegetarian?) to Thomas Jefferson. Although she is based in Los Angeles and holds most of her classes at the Getty Center and other museums in the area, Gomez-Rejon frequently jets to other cities for classes, like the one I was at in New York. (See a schedule here).

This evening, we were tracing the victorious route of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), the Macedonian king and general who, along with his army of 44,000 hungry men, traveled 22,000 miles from Greece to Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and India in a 12-year trail of conquest and culinary discovery.

Tags: art history, Artbites, cooking classes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, museum, persepolis

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