Italian Cooking Lesson and Dinner

We have a dear friend who is a coach for a local swim team (she also happens to be the grandmother of our cute neighborhood kids and the mother of our cool, hip neighbor). Every year, the swim team holds a dinner/dance/auction...you may remember from this post last year...that we came home with a scooter! Luckily, we did not come home with any motor vehicles this year! But we did buy an evening for 6 with the swim coach...for Italian cooking lessons and dinner. What an awesome night this was and we were so lucky to some great friends to share it with!!!

Here's the guys - spending more time talking about wine and politics than paying attention to their food preparation!


One of our recipes was an eggplant rollup that was absolutely delish - I don't have a pic of the finished product but here's Donna and I slicing our eggplant.


The girls are paying much more attention to the food preparation!!!


Donna and Sally enjoying the great weather, watching our lead chef fry up the eggplant.

Sally and I sharing a toast.

Part of the group enjoying wine and appetizers.

Yummy appetizers: shrimp & garlic.....

Here's our almost finished project - homemade ravioli. None of us had ever made homemade ravioli before....it was amazingly easy but messy. These happen to be stuffed with a ricotta/basil mixture. A note here: the "boys" decided the ravioli would be best if they added some red wine to the mixture....DO NOT DO THIS IN REAL LIFE!!! Those ravioli were not edible...luckily, the rest of us had made enough to feed the whole crowd!

Adding the stuffing to the dough.

Alberto's came out beautifully!

A beautiful table set with a nice, fresh Caesar salad and Pelligrino.

A good time being had by all!!!!!

Not only did we make the ravioli, we also made the homemade sauce...yummo.

Dick with our amazing hostess. Note the empty Limoncello bottle which was the cause for quite a few headaches the next day.

Hope you enjoyed a peek into our fun cooking class!!!