The EPIC 11 Course Lunch

Buon giorno i miei amici!  Good morning my friends!  Today, I will drop the F-bomb on all of you.  What kind of bomb?  A FOOD bomb of course!  My apologies for the delay in posting. This one took a little more time than usual.

Recently I had the pleasure to participate in a truly EPIC 11 course lunch.  The location: Titignagno, a 2 hour bus ride north of Rome.  The business: Agritourism.  That's a shortened version of agricultural tourism and as a foodie, I'm pretty sure I was elevated to a heightened state.  Was it heaven?  Was it reality?  What IS reality, really?  Ok, going too deep.

Back to food.

This place was incredible.  Talk about an interesting business operation.  I learned that it's a seriously large estate with acres and acres of land owned to help make not most, but ALL of their meals.  Other than bottled water, post-meal espressos and those who fancy a coca-cola light (diet coke in the states), they do not outsource as far as I know.  Everything else is grown here, farmed here, raised here, then prepared here for meals.  That includes the wine. To make it more than just a restaurant experience, they have a pool, views, lots of land to explore and plenty of guest rooms for those who want to make a great night out of it, hence the tourism aspect.

I wonder if an operation like this would work in America.  Does anyone know of one already in existence?  Let me know in the comments as I'm always interested to hear about my future hangouts. :)

Now it's time for you to experience the meal with me.

First we got out of the bus, walked down to the dining hall and I had to stop.  What a view.  Hills in the distance, beautiful stone driveway and lot, lovely old buildings.  Very just VASGO worthy.

To the right is the dining hall, to the left are guest rooms for those spending the night.

 When you are busy taking pictures, you are not paying attention to the more important things such as the food tables with our first round of appetizers.  I immediately sprint to the table.  After all, I'm in competition with about 150 study-abroad college students who know how to eat well too.  Luckily, I have the strength of a 30 year old, over 6 feet tall, plus 200 pounds man.  Now you can visualize me picking up that short, frail twig of a sophomore college student, holding him above my head using both hands and releasing a guttural war cry as I throw him over a 3 foot tall stone wall.  I said get out of the way kid.

Good, now I can see the table.

Man, those appetizers look good. I should only try a few so I have room for  the actual meal.

But wait!!!  Where I'm standing gives such a fantastic view of the other half of this agritouristic delight.

To the left: More students to throw over walls.  To the far right: The guest rooms.  Center: The Chapel.

Then I turn around and look at the 3 foot wall I "might have" thrown the sophomore over.  Turns out it's a 30 foot wall.  Hmm.  Who would have thought?   Guess I should have paid more attention to the excellent view.  Seriously though, beautiful, isn't it?

I love the winding river and the fact that their crops are grown so close to where we are eating.

Then I get my hands on my first appetizer of the day.

ENTER COURSE #1!

Here's me trying their home made pork sausage and mild white cheese crostini.  Very warm and fresh out of the oven, very tasty.

They had fresh apricot and pear juice from their own trees and some bottled water to start us off.   I chose water and apricot.  Below left is the brined caper and anchovy pate crostini, or at least that's what I thought it tasted like.  Right of that is the Arancini - packed rice wraps a nugget of mozzarella cheese and a basil leaf, then deep fried to perfection so mr. cheese nugget turns into gooey goodness.

ENTER COURSE #2.  The second round of appetizers outside. I didn't try all of the pizzetti, but think of about 4 different types of flat breads being laid out on a table next to the empty plates from the first round.

We tried the Margherita (tomatoes, mozzarella and basil) and the White pizzetti - fresh rosemary, fresh olive oil and salt, easily my favorite of the two.

And then it's back to the real reason why we are here.  Like the dinner bell is rung in the days when cell phones weren't given to farmers children, the head honcho, Dean Strommen in the blue shirt, turns up the volume on his vocal cords and tells us all to get inside.  It's time for the main event.

Even the walls of the room were interesting.  I think the ceiling may have been cooler though.

Ok.  First let's pour a drink.  I think I'll have a glass of the estate-created red wine, and a glass of bottled water.

Delicious house made red wine.

ENTER COURSE #3. Meat plate!

Left: Proscuitto.  Center: Salami.  Right: Lonza aka pork shoulder is what an expert thought it was.  All were salty and delicious.

ENTER COURSE #4.  Torta Salata, translated officially as "salt cake".  Why?  I will never know because it surely was not salty or cakey. Cakey is a made up adjective by the way.  However, look at the layers of cheese between the three layers of buttery pastry.  Seriously delicious.

The cheese layers were creamy like a brie.  Found out they were made of Emmentaler (Swiss cheese), Mozzarella and Parmigiana.

ENTER COURSE #5.  Asparagus Risotto.  At first, I was overwhelmed with the nose of this dish.  It was pungent the way canned green beans have a soggy, overcooked odor to it.  It was almost unpleasant.  But as they say, never judge a book by its cover.  Even though it was too hot a dish to eat on an 85 degree F day, oddly enough, it worked its way on the palate and slowly won over my taste buds.

The rice also seemed perfectly cooked.  Tender, moist, and absorbed a surprising amount of asparagus flavor.

ENTER COURSE #6. Pappardelle con sugo dicinguiale.  Pappardale in Wild Boar Sauce.  I got a whiff of this and immediately began salivating.  It smelled excellent, like a pot roast served to you in the middle of winter after a rough afternoon of snow shoveling.  We're talking ultimate comfort food folks.

The noodles are freshly made, not completely uniform like a commercial noodle maker would create, with perfect thickness and slight grittiness to its exterior to soak up the light sauce.  The boar is shredded very thin so each noodle grabs plenty of meat with its gritty yet tender microscopic suction cups.  The sauce is oil based.  The flavor reminds me of pureed carrots, onions, celery, thyme, bay leaves such as you would find as the standard base for many made from scratch soups.  What's the name of that again?  Isn't it French?  C'mon foodie readers.  Help all of us out here in the comments box with the real name.

Already there has been so much food and so much more to come, but I had to have seconds of this dish.

Without a doubt, this was my favorite dish of the entire event.

ENTER COURSE #7.  Capriolo.  Venison.  Deer meat.  Bambi!  I don't eat venison often but if it were cooked like this, I'm pretty sure it would be a constant household request.  The chunks of deer are very tender and hardly gamey in taste.  The sauce is pronounced with rosemary.  Made with whole, unbrined olives and mushrooms grown on the estate, this dish goes from rosemary flavor to slight game flavor, to wonderfully accented herb sauce flavor.  A superb dish.

Poor Bambi.  Thanks for tasting so good.

ENTER COURSE #8.  Roast Chicken, Potatoes and Lamb.  This was a good dish, but I think my stomach was also telling me it's just about done and so I didn't desire these as much.  However, the skin on the chicken was crispy and salty making it taste VERY good.  The potatoes were buttery, baked, skinless and only had salt and pepper made with them.  Surprisingly addictive.  And the lamb was heavily seasoned with fresh herbs, particularly rosemary.  But that made the dish that much better.

ENTER COURSE #9.  Shellfish?  Really? Out here in the middle of the land?  It didn't seem like this would have been a dish normally added to the lineup.  Out here in Italy, regional cooking is everything and here in Umbria, we are landlocked.  No body of salt water is nearby.

Ohh that makes way more sense.  The wait staff just explained that this was part of the vegetarian-only meal. But once they were brought out to our non-meat eating friends, they were respectfully declined.  I found it interesting that shellfish qualified as a vegetarian item here.

Anyway, enter some sort of breaded shrimp dish on a skewer.

Looks pretty good.

So I dig in.  Wait!  What's that?  The shrimp is sitting in something of a cup?  Now I have to try this.  Take a bite of the cup.  Rubbery, bland, a little cold.  This must be squid.  Needs more flavor in my opinion and could have used less time in the oven.

Let's try the shrimp.  Breading is rather flavorless. Maybe some salt would help.  What's this crunch I'm getting?  It's not the breading.  Interesting. They don't remove the legs before cooking it.  I'm not grossed out eating the legs as plenty of other cultures eat them, even Asian ones eat them solely as a snack if my memory of travel food shows serves me correct.  It's just not what I'm used to from growing up in the US.

Surprise!  Have some squid with your shrimp.

Are you kidding me?  Now you're going to bring out salad?  Ok.  I'll try some of that too.  I didn't consider this another course, though I should have to make it even more courses.  The Insalata looks like it's romaine lettuce and all that seems to be on it is the estate's fresh olive oil.  It's surprisingly good.

The olive oil on the lettuce is so fresh.  Absolutely delicious.

ENTER COURSE #10.  Tiramisu.  I loved this picture because of the distinct layers.  The taste of this dish: really really good.  The marsala wine used in this dish is surprisingly noticeable but not overpowering.  And there was not as much espresso flavor as I was expecting.  The ladyfingers - moist but not soaked.

The tiramisu here was wonderful.

ENTER COURSE #11. Vino Santo con Biscotti.  "Holy" Wine with Cookies.  The experts around me couldn't completely explain why Italians use Santo, Holy, to describe this wine but the most obvious reason is that it is sweet.  It is an after meal wine.

The Vino Santo was sweet, bright, perfumed in a way, and included hints of sherry.

Then an expert who has lived here multiple years shows me how to eat this second dessert.  What?  You dip your biscotti in the wine?  Yes please.

For those who don't know how to dip a cookie in a wine glass, do it like this.

The cookie was an almond biscotti.  It contained whole, blanched almonds added into its dough before it is baked.  By itself, the flavors are so light that it's nothing much to rave about.  Dipped in the vino santo, almond flavor is brought out big time.

Believe it or not, they even concluded this course with one more which was just a shot of espresso.  But I didn't count that either.

Let's total everything up, shall we?

TOTAL NUMBER OF COURSES: 11
TOTAL NUMBER OF FOODS TRIED: 19
TOTAL NUMBER OF FOODS AVAILABLE TO TRY: 24 (including all the appetizers outside)

What a meal!  An expert told me this was a mini-version of an Italian wedding feast you would experience at a reception.  Are you kidding?  This was a mini-version?

Generally there is no concern whether a person eats all on their plate so portions are always much larger than what you saw today.  Good thing this isn't an everyday meal. I'm full just thinking about it.

Buon Appetito my friends!