16 days to go before I make my trek to Italy for 5 months this year, but our tours have started.  Fortunately, so that I could get some last minute work done and finish coaching our son's baseball team, Paola went over ahead of me for our first tour of the year.

Scott & Michelle (from Texas),  and Don & MaryAnn (from Washington) are our guests for this week that ends tomorrow.  They have chosen to do a somewhat custom itinerary that more or less mixes some of the highlights from other itineraries we offer... making it somewhat intense:  Rome, Florence, Cortona, up into Umbria, etc. etc.

To my utter pleasure, Michelle has a Blog where she has been posting daily trip reports.  It's  a great read!  Have a look.  

Last week Paola wanted to teach Alyssa, our 18 year old daughter, how to make Ceci Soup. She was saying it was so easy that she could do it blindfolded. As we laughed at her, she insisted that she could, so I ended up betting her $100 that she couldn’t. What started out as a stupid little bet turned into an evening of intense laughter and family fun.

We found a sock, blindfolded Paola and she went to task as I filmed her. While it all went quite well, she failed to consider a few potential pitfalls. For one, at our house here in Florida, we have a flat electric stove. Finding the buttons was an exercise of trial and error. Additionally, she had some trouble finding rosemary, and finally learned that Paprika and Marjoram smell more or less the same.

In the end, with almost no help at all, Paola pulls it off. More importantly, we had a week’s worth of laughter in an evening… and some great Ceci soup!

Those of you that know us from our cooking classes and tours in Italy will get a chance to see Paola do her thing at our winter home in the States.

I only hope you have as much fun watching this as we did making it. We’re even talking about make this a regular thing, turning it into a video cooking class.