Meeting at Martinica Cafe before Shopping

Donna and Sharona at Martinica

Silvestro on Shopping Trip

Horse Meat Counter at Market

Cheese Man at Market

Donna and Karen at School

Dinner Table

Monday, May 21st -- Our first day at The Awaiting Table.  We met for breakfast on the first floor of our hotel in an unusual dining area with several, and very old small tables for two.  Breakfast in this part of Italy consists of very dense bread, pastries, yogurt and coffee.  Silvestro picked us up at our hotel and we walked over to a local coffee house where we met a young honeymoon couple from London who joined us for the day at school, Nick and Alexa, along with Georgio.

Silvestro then took us on a shopping expedition to purchase the items we would need for preparing both lunch and dinner today. We vistied several shops, but the groceries were all purchased at the market store that had departments for meat, poultry, a seperate counter for horse meat (really), fruits and vegetables. We were told that horses are raised in Italy specifically for meat and is considered a staple meat source.

We then proceded to the school where we learned to make pasta dough that we then shaped into both Mexican hats and a spiraled shape about 6-inches long. The dough was made from a combination of wheat and barley flour. We each made different things for lunch -- the Mexican hat pasta, a potato casserole, a veggie dish -- we also had several cheeses again, and wine. My contribution was melting a kilo of sugar that I poured over almonds to make an almond brittle, with a lemon half rubbed across the hardened surface. Not my favorite dessert.

After lunch we went back to our hotel to rest until 6:30 pm when we were to meet Silvestro at the Central Square for a short walk and back to the school to cook dinner. Rather than resting, which would have been smarter, we took an hour walk around the old section of Lecce. We has littletime for rest before meeting up with Silvestro shortly after finishing our own walk. He took us to the new shopping area of Lecce -- we wanted to buy soccer jerseys for the grandchildren and he took us to a shop specializing in everything soccer. We bought several Lecce soccer team jerseys and then headed back to class.

The spiral shaped pasta had dried, and we prepared fennel, peppers and eggplant which were all grilled on the range.  Tomato sauce (almost the consistency of tomato juice) was reduced for the pasta sauce with a very strong gorganzola cheese added. Once again we had several wines, a rose while we prepared dinner, and a red at the table. Silvestro gave us several chalkboard lessons on foods of Italy by region, interesting but lost quickly after.

We finished dinner and headed back to our hotel about 11:00 pm.  We said our goodbyes to Nick and Alexa who were invited to join us on our city walking tour tomorrow, but would probably head out on their own as they had only a few days left of their honeymoon.