My wife and I just returned from an intensive week at the CIA in Hyde
Park NY for a "Boot Camp" in Italian cooking. Not for the faint of
heart or those with little or no kitchen skills. It's a fairly
exhausting grind to cook full out for five hours a day non-stop
starting at 7:00am and ending after dinner at 10:00. Some lectures on
regional Italian cuisine and ingredients, brief demos on proper
rissotto, making pasta, sauce prep, tasting the dozen or so dishes
that were prepared each day by the 12 students (all of us were 50+) in
the class then wine pairing/tasting, cheese tasting, more lectures and
demos. Dinner each night at a different CIA restaurant staffed by
students (kids).

The wine portion was run by John Fischer and we tasted a few selected
wines from Sardinia, Piedmont and Umbria. Not really very informative
and except for a bottle of '04 Ceretto Barberesco Asji the wines were
pretty poor quality. All in all the wine portion of the program was
pretty weak.

On Nov 2, 11:44?am, Bi!! > wrote:
> My wife and I just returned from an intensive week at the CIA in Hyde
> Park NY for a "Boot Camp" in Italian cooking. Not for the faint of
> heart or those with little or no kitchen skills. It's a fairly
> exhausting grind to cook full out for five hours a day non-stop
> starting at 7:00am and ending after dinner at 10:00. Some lectures on
> regional Italian cuisine and ingredients, brief demos on proper
> rissotto, making pasta, sauce prep, tasting the dozen or so dishes
> that were prepared each day by the 12 students (all of us were 50+) in
> the class then wine pairing/tasting, cheese tasting, more lectures and
> demos. Dinner each night at a different CIA restaurant staffed by
> students (kids).
>
> The wine portion was run by John Fischer and we tasted a few selected
> wines from Sardinia, Piedmont and Umbria. Not really very informative
> and except for a bottle of '04 Ceretto Barberesco Asji the wines were
> pretty poor quality. All in all the wine portion of the program was
> pretty weak.

Actually sounds pretty fun to me (except bad wine part). Do it again,
but tack on another day for recreation, and we NYers will try to make
up for the bad wine!
Dale (about an hour south)