The Unreal Meal

It’s been a while since I posted, and much of that has been due to the fact that I swear to you that I’ve been sick for the entire month of July, so it’s been sapping my creativity a bit.  For someone who doesn’t get sick very often (usually once a year or so), when I do get hit, I get really whiny and it’s just not fun for anyone (me included).

Anyway, I’m not here to cull sympathy from the masses, but instead to talk about food!  A friend of mine tells me that today is National Lasagna Day, and a quick Google search confirms this for me.  I wish that I’d known this before this morning, or I’d have planned some kind of lasagna dinner for this evening.  Instead, we’ll be having moo shu beef lettuce cups (a Weight Watcher’s recipe), as we’re all trying to be more healthful in our house.

Nonetheless, I’m still inspired by the thought of lasagna!  I love Italian food, and lasagna is one of the best comfort foods there is, I think.  Heck, for me, pasta of any sort is just happy and delicious.  It’s one of those things that I know how to make fresh, but I never do because I don’t have a pasta roller (and rolling it by hand is seriously exhausting – or at least it is with my little rolling pin).  I keep meaning to get myself a pasta roller, but I keep not doing it for some reason.

This morning I was reading my e-mail, and one of the various newsletters/mailing lists that I receive is from a site called Groupon.  Groupon is a site that offers cool things in various major cities across the US at a group discount.  They work with companies to provide a daily offer of something cool to do.  Today’s (NYC) offer was for one of four classes at New York Vintners (a local wine shop here in Manhattan) that does short food and wine classes.  The classes are normally $45, but today’s Groupon price was $20 per ticket, so I snatched up some tickets.

The classes available are Sake and Cheese, Wine 101, Pinot Noir from Around the World, and the one that I really want to try most: Interactive Pasta Class with Italian Wines.  The pasta class is described as “Join us for a Sunday afternoon tasting of six Italian wines while Chef shows us how to make several different pastas, and then demonstrates how to make some of our favorite pasta dishes.”  Aside from an extraneous comma, that synopsis sounds perfect to me.  Like I said, it’s not that I don’t know how to make fresh pasta, but I’m also of a firm belief that you can never stop learning, and there’s always something to be gained from those more experienced.

So in honor of National Lasagna Day, I am going to learn some more about Italian Wines and making pasta.  Of course, today’s Groupon offering was so popular that I may never be able to find an open class, but we’ll see!  Hopefully it doesn’t take me until National Lasagna Day next year to get there!

I’m always interested in seminars and classes like these around the city, especially if they’re not terribly expensive.  I can’t afford culinary school at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn via other avenues, right?  It’s all in a quest to make every meal unreal!