After meeting up with the family after lunch, we hopped on a bus & headed to a beautiful villa in Tuscany just outside of Florence. The tour was put together by a wonderful company called Walkabout Tours Florence & our guides, Angela, Luca, & Tiziano were amazing. This was the highlight of our time in Florence.
We got dropped off at the villa overlooking the beautiful Tuscan countryside.
Angela, our main teacher showed us the villa garden & told us some history about the villa & the area.
Next, we got to harvest our own herbs, fruits, & vegetables from the villa garden. We would use everything we picked to make homemade gelato & homemade pizza.
We picked strawberries, lemons, zucchini, eggplant, thyme, lavender, basil, tomatoes, & more.
After picking our ingredients, we were introduced to our pizza chefs: Luca & Tiziano. They offered us some cheese bread & wine (which we don't drink), & sparkling water. Then we went inside the villa to learn how to make homemade gelato.
Everybody partnered up & chose a recipe. I was working with Drew & we made Stracciatella gelato. Everybody had a different flavor to make: Dark Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, Lemon, Pear, Hazelnut, Pistachio, & more. We got our recipes & gathered our ingredients from the kitchen.
And then we got to work.
After this experience, I decided that I really want an immersion blender & a good ice cream maker. Gelato is REALLY easy to make as long as you have fresh ingredients & GOOD appliances.
Once we made our gelato base, Angela threw them in the freezer to set up while we went outside to work with Luca & Tiziano to learn how to make homemade pizza dough. It was SO simple. I had no idea making my own dough would be so easy.
Each of us got a chance to mix our own dough by hand & stretch it until it made a perfect dough ball.
After making dough, I cleaning our sticky doughy hands, we went back inside to do the next step for our gelato. We poured our mixtures into a frozen ice cream maker & let them start to churn. Angela showed us a fun way of making instant gelato with liquid nitrogen. She also made us a super secret flavored gelato to try. . .
Canyon got to be the first to taste it. It was DELICIOUS! It was a lemon, lavender, black pepper gelato & everything complimented each other so nicely. Even the kids liked it.
The gelato needed to churn for a while to harden up, so we went back outside with Luca & Tiziano to finish making our delicious pizzas.
They had all of our freshly picked ingredients waiting for us & the kids got to chop the herbs.
Trek got to make the tomato sauce.
Luca picked him specifically for this task because Luca had a slight crush on Trek. (I'm sure it was all just part of the show, but it was hilarious all the same). He would find ways to get Trek near him so he could flirt with him. As soon as Trek's hands went into the tomatoes to smash them, Luca immediately wrapped his arms around Trek & "squeezed" his waist a few times which made ALL of us laugh hysterically. Poor Trek. He was a good sport about it.
Luca showed us how to roll & throw our pizza dough so that we could each have a big pizza all to ourselves.
And then we topped our dough with homemade pizza sauce, & all the yummy cheese, herbs, & vegetables we liked.
Throwing the dough was the favorite of all the kids. Some were really good at it, others, not so much, but it was a blast to try.
Tiziano put all our pizzas into the wonderful stone oven. They cooked in 2 minutes flat.
And boy were they delicious.
After cleaning up our wonderful pizza dinner, we walked down to the garden again to enjoy our homemade gelato. It was FABULOUS. (I'm still angry I didn't take any pictures of it, but it was beautiful.). I LOVED the pistachio the most & surprisingly I really enjoyed strawberry with a little bit of balsamic vinegar on it. The gelato/food combinations Angela came up with were divine. We really enjoyed them.
We ended the night with certificates showing that we were master pizza & gelato chefs. It was a super cute way to end the night.
I've decided that I love food tours. Anything that allows us to make & eat food is my favorite. I loved this so much!
After our tour, we rode the bus back to Florence where we paid our bus driver extra to take us back to the train station. Trek, Lorien, Bladen, & Cadence ran back to our hotel in the city, picked up our luggage, & met us back at the train station.
Most of the trains back to Rome were sold out. Not only were they sold out, but the ones that were available took 5 HOURS to get back. We'd be getting back at 3 in the morning. We finally found one train that took us back in 2 hours, but it was nearly $400 for our family alone. I wanted to cry. Tylee offered to help offset the costs as long as we got on the 2 hour train. (We were all exhausted at this point. It was already 8pm & we just wanted to get back to Rome.). We went to buy the tickets & of course all the machines went down right when we needed to buy them. They wouldn't take American cards AT ALL so we were able to cram a bunch of cash in for some of the tickets & then I ended up having to spend about $500 on my German card (which I don't keep much money on) just so we could guarantee our spots on the train. Then our train got cancelled. (Insert face palm emoji here). We just couldn't catch a break. We finally were able to talk to some workers & showed them our tickets & they put us on the next ice train out of Florence.
That train ride we slept most of the time & arrived back at Rome Termini at 11:45 pm. We RAN from the station to the bus terminal HOPING we could catch the last bus of the day (midnight) to our hotel. Luckily, we got it & made it back to our hotel around 12:30 am. Whew.
Trek & I planned to go to the temple on Sunday, so we stayed up a little later trying to find the best bus routes to the temple. Sacrament meeting started at 9am & it would take us over an hour to get there, so we had to get up early & leave by 7:30am. (when you go to bed at 2 or 3, that is VERY hard to do). But we did it!
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