Black pepper fettuccini in a white wine cream sauce and lemon-zested veal?
No, I’m not in Italy. I’m grating cheese, frying up bacon and boiling fresh-made pasta at a Vancouver cooking class.
Fun in the kitchen of this Vancouver cooking class – a glass of wine makes the “work” easy :-)
One nifty thing about being travel writers is being invited to media events in our home city – and getting to discover places we’ve not visited before. The Dirty Apron Cooking School & Delicatessen in Vancouver’s funky Crosstown district is such a place.
The reason for this invitation? Air Transat is launching new non-stop summer flights from Vancouver to Rome, starting in June.
Yes, we’d like to fly to Rome and see the Colosseum!
What better way to share the Rome news with Vancouver travel writers, editors and bloggers than by giving them a “get-your-hands-mucky” taste of Italy at a Vancouver cooking class!
Wine glasses in hand, we were divided into teams to work on making the pasta, fettuccini sauce, veal, veggies and dessert.
Here’s what we made:
Our Vancouver cooking class prepares this Italian feast
- Black pepper fettuccini in white wine cream sauce
- Grilled veal in a chanterelle cream sauce, accompanied by herb ricotta gnocchi and asparagus spears
- A trio of desserts – lemon panna cotta; olive oil and rosemary cake with orange-and-fig marmalade; and Italian biscotti with pistachio icecream.
I was assigned to the pasta team.
Some team-mates mixed flour, salt and eggs to form the pasta dough, which they then pounded and kneaded. The most fun part was feeding flattened sections of dough through the pasta machine to make LONG strings of noodles.
How long can we make this strip of dough?
Thin flat strips of dough are fed through the noodle cutter to make fettuccini noodles
In the meantime, I helped to make the cream sauce with Karm Sumal (the passionate young founder of Vancity Buzz, a hit Vancouver webzine which draws in more than 4 million visitors a month).
Actually, I confess, he did most of the onion dicing and cheese slicing – thanks Karm!
(I had a glass of Pinot Grigio to nurse. But I did drizzle olive oil over the cherry tomatoes and slip them into the oven!) And we had lots of help from our chef instructors – who no doubt are used to their students getting distracted from their cooking tasks by wine and chit-chat as the evening progresses.
The veggie team makes asparagus spears
Veal sizzles in a frying pan…
Eventually, our masterpiece was ready, and we served our pasta appetizer to the other teams at a communal dining table – to much applause, I’m proud to say.
There was only one oversight on our part – we forgot to make enough pasta for ourselves! No worries, though. The real chefs (aka, our instructors) quickly got to work and made the pasta team some pasta :-).
Our job done, we got to sit back, relax and enjoy the main course and dessert served by those teams.
Now, just in case you want to make your own black pepper pasta at home, here’s the recipe.
Buon appetito!
Recipe for black pepper fettuccini in white wine cream sauce
Ingredients:
Black pepper pasta dough
120 g double smoked bacon
2 shallots (finely diced)
2 cloves garlic (minced)
6 cherry tomatoes (cut in half)
125 ml white wine
125 ml heavy cream
½ cup arugula
¼ cup pitted Kalamata olives
10 g grated Parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper
Vegetable oil
Olive oil
Method:
In a saucepot lightly coated with vegetable oil, cook the bacon over high heat until it’s browned and the fat has been rendered. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the pancetta to a paper towel-lined plate. Reserve for later use.
In the same saucepot, sauté the shallots and garlic for about a minute. Add the white wine and reduce the liquid to about half of its original volume. Next, add the cream and Parmesan cheese, cooking until slightly thickened. Season with salt and pepper.
Add the pasta to a pot of salted boiling water and cook for approximately 2 minutes. Drain the pasta and add to the cream sauce. Serve on a plate. Sprinkle arugula, cherry tomatoes, olives and crisp pancetta on top.
Adjust the seasoning, and garnish with grated Parmesan cheese.
Pin this image to Pinterest!
The Dirty Apron’s Vancouver cooking classes
- Classes: Want to know how to whip up chicken coq au vin and other classic French dishes? Interested in a night of British Columbia food-and-wine pairings (find out if Pinot Noir goes with crispy seared BC salmon)? The Dirty Apron Cooking School & Delicatessen offers a whole slew of hands-on classes in different foods around the world each month. The class size is limited to 22.
- Times: Evening dinner classes run from 5:30 to 9:30 pm. On weekends, lunch-time classes are from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm.
- Cost: Most classes are $158 CAD ($125 USD) p.p. and include wine.
Air Transat flies to Europe
- About Air Transat: Air Transat is a leading Canadian-based holiday airline. Charter flights take sun-seekers and holiday-goers to some 60 destinations in 30 countries (mainly in Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, the Mediterranean and Europe).
- Mix-and-match holiday packages: You can book just the flights, or holiday packages combining flights and hotels. For added flexibility, you can fly into one city (say Rome) and fly out of another (like Venice). You can also add on guided tours of your choice (e.g., a “skip-the-line” guided half-day tour of the Vatican in Rome).
- Cost: Roundtrip Vancouver-to-Rome flights start at a low of $864 CAD ($680 USD), incl. all taxes and fees.
We’re Janice and George Mucalov, professional award-winning travel writers, sharing tales of luxury travel with a twist of adventure.
Looks like you had a blast! Thanks for posting the recipe! It looks heavenly!
Yes, I had a lot of fun – especially enjoyed the eating part :-).
Looks delicious! I love fresh pasta when someone else makes it!
Agreed! It’s hard sometimes getting it to cook just “al dente” and not soggy…
Can I just say yum!!! I must go to this cooking class!!
Yes, a simple “yum” is allowed :-).
No better food than Italian and no better than Italian fiesta. It looks amazing!
Italian is one of our favorite foods too! Always in the mood for good pasta and authentic, wood-oven baked pizza…
You made me hungry and it’s only 9:30 in the morning! I love cooking classes like that – did one in Minneapolis once. Your pictures are so vibrant and thanks for providing the recipe.
Glad we got the tastebuds salivating :-).
Looks like so much fun! And that veal? I can almost smell it here in Chicago. Looks divine.
You might not have to fly all the way to Vancouver for the veal :-). Though you might want to for a visit – lovely city we have! You probably have great cooking classes in Chicago too :-).
Oh, that sizzling veal! What a fun pasta-making experience — right here in the USA. I’ve done a little pasta making in Italy which was awesome. However …. I didn’t have a glass of wine to help me along.
No wine to help you along? You might have learned more pasta making as a result :-). Hope it was as fun though…
Dirty Apron’s cooking class sounds like great fun plus it comes with a delicious result! Your Italian feast sounds amazing. I’m pinning to save and try later.
Don’t know how the recipe will work at home – we had lots of help from the chef instructors :-).
Looks great! We love cooking classes but have never tried to make pasta. Guess t’s time to get our aprons dirty and give it a try.
This was a first for me (Janice) too – surprised our efforts turned out so well!
Cooking classes like this can be so much fun. I’ve not attended very many and would love to take in more. Your Italian feast looks delicious.
This was a fun cooking class, for sure :-).
I would have begged to be assigned to the pasta team … though I much prefer tubular pasta to flat pasta. Truth is, I rarely get cooking class invitations! Vancouver is lucky to have the Dirty Apron cooking school and lucky to have you!
Vancouver is a great city – and it’s fun that visitors can book these one-off dinner classes too :-).
It sounds like a great class. I hate cooking though, just love the eating part ?. How nice to have a direct flight from Vancouver. From one beautiful city to another.. We are headed back to Rome in July, can’t wait to taste my MIL’s food even though my husband’s is almost better than hers.
Yes, we like the eating part too – not so much the cooking, though wine helps to make the task more pleasant :-). Rome is such a fabulous city! You enjoy your trip!
I guess you’ll fly more often to Rome, Janice, now that you have a direct connection with Air Transat. I like the cooking school’s name: The Dirty Apron. Very suggestive. If you get your apron dirty in the kitchen presumably the food will taste good (lol!)
Cooking classes are so much fun: a few sips of wine, learning new techniques, savoring new tastes and making new friends. Can’t beat that!
Sounds like you’ve enjoyed some cooking classes before :-).
The Dirty Apron cooking school is a great name! How handy that there are now direct flights from Canada to Rome, I hope you get to visit. I was there in June last year and had a great time.
Yes, isn’t that a cool name for a cooking school! We’ve spent a few days in Rome before after a cruise. We could certainly go again – it’s been too long since our last visit :-). The non-stop flights from Vancouver to Rome would be very handy – no layovers in London or Toronto!