Last Wednesday I passed my Sommelier exam with AIS, the Italianse Sommelier Association (Associazione Italiana Sommelier) in the Hilton hotel in Amsterdam, together with 7 colleagues.
We started last February (time really flies when you're having fun!) and ended today with a didactic lunch at Roberto's, Hilton's Italian restaurant, during which we tasted different courses with different wines and exercised a bit with analyzing, deconstructing, describing and most of all enjoying all the combinations. What a great way to end the course. :)
A big "thank you!" to all of my teachers including the great Eddy Furlan (here in the pictures with us) and to all of my co-students for the laughs, the friendship, the innumerable coffees together, the many wonderful dinners and lunches and the great inspiration!
And thanks to Beppe Quiroli for the Roero Arneis pic. :)
In one of the big halls of the beautiful Westergasfabriek complex all the elephants have been admired, stroked, cuddled and photographed by hundreds of people among which my friends Leny and Villia and myself. :)
Yesterday evening my friend Claudio Varone, architect, interior designer and artist, and his artistic partner Anneke Copier presented some of their wonderful felt carpets and wall tapestries at the Dutch Design Hotel in Amsterdam at the opening of the "PUUR" exhibition.
Claudio's and Anneke's work always manages to stun me with its beauty so I expected to be "hit" by it but what I didn't expect was the very interesting setting of the exhibition, the Dutch Design Hotel. The Hotel is just outside the "obvious" part of Amsterdam, I mean the one in which I live and work, and is situated right between the city centre and Schiphol Airport in an area that until 20 years ago was all green fields and empty spaces.
Now it's an ever growing office and hotels area just like many others in this town.
It's an interesting building with modern and hip design and wall paintings - not all of them quite to my liking, I must admit - a spacious restaurant that I definitely want to try very soon and a wonderful terrace on the water where we sipped Italian wines in trendy design bottles and had sexy - I cannot define them in any other way - nibbles until after dark.
I actually found all of the artists represented quite fascinating, especially Claudio and Anneke, of course, and Marloes Duyker of Naked Design.
Here some pictures of the evening. The "PUUR" (Pure) exhibition can be visited until November 25th.
Some pictures taken yesterday at one of my favourite places to be on Saturday in Amsterdam: the organic market at the Noordermarkt.
The fresh herbs stall
Here I bought two skirts for my Tarot reading party sessions :)
Some more herbs...
Working hard to make my professional kitchen more beautiful and comfortable :)
And no, Dirk is NOT the only one working, there. ;)
My friend Claudio (the famous "Spritz Master") and I had been planning to cook together for months but we never really succeeded in doing it so far.
And then Summer came, and with it enough time to spend a whole afternoon preparing nice things to eat for a bunch of friends.
One of these dishes was a great hummus made with a few basic ingredients. The usual chickpeas (I LOVE chickpeas in any possible way) and great taste-makers like lime juice (lots of it) and a hint of tahini, the sesame paste with the typical intense flavour.
Hummus is easy and super fast to make if you have a food processor. We made tons of it and ate it with flat Turkish bread.
Hummus di Claudio e Nicoletta
Serves: a lot
Ingredients:
6 cans of precooked chickpeas (about 200 gr per can)
3 tablespoons of tahini
5 limes (their juice)
6 cloves of garlic
salt
olive oil extra virgin
flat-leaf parsley to decorate
Mix all the ingredients together in the food processor, season with salt if necessary and add enough olive oil to make the hummus creamy and smooth.
Drizzle with some extra olive oil and garnish with fresh parsley, whole leaves or finely chopped.
Since I started following the AIS sommelier course in Amsterdam my Monday evenings are sooo much nicer because there's always someone - one of my fellow students or moi - who organises some nice event: a dinner, a wine tasting or, like last Monday, a BBQ in a beautiful Amsterdam garden.
Iris invited us for a wonderful evening of eating good food, drinking excellent wines and being merry.
Victor was Master of The BBQ for the whole evening producing wonderfully juicy meat, Giovanni made grilled sardines (since I was too busy drinking wine I didn't actually see how he made them so I'll give you my own personal recipe) and we all brought a bunch of GREAT bottles of wine to taste (doing a sommelier course you always have a great excuse to drink, haven't you?)
Thank you Iris! And yes, the Boomtown Rats were wrong.
Oh gawd, I'm dating myself. :)
Serves 4 4 big sardines p.p.
A handful of garlic cloves
A small bunch of parsley
2 lemons
1-2 fresh red chilli peppers
Olive oil extra vergine
Salt and black pepper
Remove the heads of the sardines (if you do that with a movement from up to down as if you wanted to make them "nod" the guts will come off with the heads; at the same time, open the bellies with your thumb to make this easier).
Rinse the fish under cold tap water and marinate for half an hour with lemon juice, abundant olive oil, the finely chopped peppers and some peeled and sliced garlic cloves.
Fill the bellies with some parsley leaves and one garlic clove, remove the excess marinade and grill until nicely cooked.
If you want to protect the delicate meat of the smaller sardines (like the ones in the picture) put some tin foil between them and the grill.
Season with salt and pepper and serve hot.
As I already said, I'm very glad to be back in Amsterdam and at the same time I would have loved to stay a few more days in Tuscany. They're both two of my favourite places on earth so most of the times it's very difficult to make a choice of where to be and for how long but, hey, I see it more as a privilege than a burden. :)
In a sense I HAD to come back immediately after my cooking holiday at Tuscan agriturismo Il cantastorie because last Monday we started the second level of the sommelier course organized by AIS (the Italian Sommelier Association) at the Amsterdam Hilton and if there's one thing I definitely want to avoid is missing some of the lessons. I just LOVE this course.
Our teacher during these first two days was Andrea Gori, a young sommelier from Florence who's already reached great levels of fame and professionality in the relatively short period that he's been working in the wine business. Andrea is an enthousiastic teacher and has a very interesting wine blog called Vino da Burde plus a restaurant in Florence called Trattoria da Burde that I hope to be visiting soon.
When he told me that he blogs what he's been doing, seeing and tasting mostly on the very night he's been to an event or has visited a new restaurant I felt a bit ashamed of my extremely slow "blogging pattern" and at the same time very inspired to - at least try and - do the same. So thank you Andrea for getting me here in front of my laptop so late at night sorting pictures and writing stuff I'll need to re-read in the morning 'cause I'm too sleepy to make some sense. ;)
After the first day of the course, dinner at Segugio with some of my fellow students followed.
Segugio is one of the best (and best known) Italian restaurants in Amsterdam, situated in the Utrechsestraat, one of my favourite Amsterdam streets for its many restaurants and original shops. The menu had been chosen for us by Emanuele Birtolo, studying to become AIS sommelier and working at Segugio.
The great kitchen staff guided by chef Fabio Ardu spoiled us with a crostino of self-made focaccia with buffalo mozzarella and a quite interesting bell pepper sauce, red mullet fillet on a bed of sea aster with baby fennel a butter-lemon sauce, a great - and very, very, VERY al dente - risotto with saffron and testùn (the lovely cheese from the Piedmont region), some temptingly sweet ravioli filled with home made sausage and served with a fresh tomato sauce, a wonderfully tender and juicy veal fillet with steamed vegetables in Parmigiano sauce and, dulcis in fundo, a GREAT dessert with a creamy, surprising and nicely spiced homemade clove ice-cream served with a very sexy and luscious little chocolate fondant. Even the raspberry that came with it was absolutely perfect: plump, moist and sweeter than sweet. A fantastic combination with the rich chocolate of the fondant...
Everything was accompanied by the wines chosen in "joint-venture" by Andrea and Emanuele. We've had some very good stuff like a Vernaccia di San Gimignano Montenidoli Carato 2005, a Teroldego Rotaliano Foradori 2005, a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo S. Martino Rosso Marina Cvetic (don't remember the year) and a nice and smooth Recioto della Valpolicella classico Venturini 2005 that came with the dessert.
It's been a great evening made of good food, good wines, nice conversation and a very cheerful, intelligent and inspiring company. Thanks to Andrea for explaining us so many things about the wines without making it feel like a "serious" lesson but ore like a breathtaking adventure - something he manages to do every time he's teaching.
An evening to be repeated soon, I hope. Seeing the enthousiasm and the eagerness to learn, to share and to be together of my fellow students and myself I have no doubt we'll have many more evenings like this one. Can't wait for the next occasion!
Segugio also means private eye in Italian...
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