Yesterday we took a field trip to Perugia, chocolate capital of Italy, to get certificates at the Scuola di Cioccolata, for working with chocolate. I even have a series of pictures in which I look quite serious about my chocolate making:

Making the white chocolate and limoncello filling.

Tempering the chocolate, so that it will be smooth and shiny. Without this step, the chocolate wouldn't be crisp, and the color and texture would be off.

Pouring the excess tempered chocolate out of the molds.

Piping the filling into the molds after they set.

And the final product: chocolate roses with white chocolate-limoncello filling. They're pretty tasty, I saved you some :)

The chocolate factory we trained in is famous for their "baci" or "kisses", which are lumps of chocolate with a hazelnut or cherry loomped on top. Our tour guide's outfit actually looked kind of oompah-ish, but I think she didn't mean to do it on purpose...

I suppose I should explain about the bus before I go on. We take a large tour bus to our destinations when we go on field trips, and... "uncomfortable" just doesn't describe the gut-wrenching horror of having to ride on that thing. Sure, it LOOKS nice enough, from the outside, but once trapped within it becomes a sweltering muggy cesspool of straight-backed seats and terrifying views out the windows as our suicidal drivers hurtle us down winding roads next to sheer cliff faces and honk angrily at the smaller cars our bus needs to eat to fuel its rampage.

The first field trip driver merely looked depressed, and we worried for his sanity. We were a bit erked when he said that we couldn't eat on the bus, but we dealt with it.

This guy, though, has some sort of vendetta against dirty tourists. He wouldn't allow us to take our backpacks onto the bus, and he put towels down on the steps and glared at us when we walked on. Same exact bus as last time, mind you.

Luckily, Perugia was only an hour away, and the driver didn't know English. We joked around in gruff Italian accents about it to pass the time... "no backpacks on the bus! No walking on the bus! No sitting on the bus!! No standing on the bus!! NO LOOKING AT THE BUS!!!! MY BUS!!!"

All of us were damn happy to get off the bus and go to lunch, to top it off the guy didn't understand the directions and kept having to make u-turns. We finally found a restaurant that would accommodate the 20 of us, and it was probably the best meal I've had since I've been here, just a guy and his wife cooking simple food in a little village outside Perugia.

Risotto croquetta, cappicolo, procuitto on fried flatbread.

Homemade pasta in a light tomato sauce with grated pecorino cheese.

Green salad, wood-oven roasted ribs and pork chops, and sausage with chickory. Fantastic.

After the brutal bus ride, my table got... a little rowdy with the endless flow of awesome table wine served in carafes pulled from the barrel in the kitchen. Only then did we figure out that we were visiting a winery afterwards. It was a pretty giggly wine tour.

This was one of the larger wineries in Umbria, they produced several kinds of wine, including sparkling.

Alas, the bottles above were not for sale :(

Then we did a tasting of the wines from the vineyard, and toured an amazing wine museum, and an (also amazing) olive oil museum. I wish we could have spent more time in them, but we had dinner reservations at the Michelin-starred Tre Vassiles pictured above.

Either late tonight or early tomorrow, I'm leaving for Cinque Terre, so I won't be posting over the weekend, but I should (hopefully) have some good stories and pictures when I get back.

Ciao!