Chianti!

Just got back from Chianti trip with Palazzo Rucellai (that's the school I'm attending here).  For those of you who don't know, Chianti is a region of Tuscany, and the wine is named after the region where it is produced.  Absolutely amazing place we went to, it was in the hills of Tuscany, one of the most beautiful places I've been to.  I'll be uploading pictures on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/brendan.coburn) of the trip.  First we took a tour of a small castle that used to be owned by the Pazzi family, made famous by the Pazzi Conspiracy.  It is now owned by someone else, and they grow grapes and olives on the land and produce red wine, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil.  They had tons of wine barrels in the basement, once again, pictures of them will be on Facebook.

The tour guide taught us a bit of interesting information about olive oil, some of which was new to me.  Extra virgin olive oil is essentially the first press of oil that is extracted from the olives, nothing is added, nothing is filtered, you could eat it straight from the machine.  Look for "first cold press".  The other stuff you find in the stores, labeled just "Olive Oil" or even "Virgin Olive Oil" is not nearly the same thing.  Long story short, the extra virgin variety is healthy, the others are not, and there are even variations within the extra virgin category that make some better than others.  What was interesting, though, was that the tour guide mentioned that the United States government recently declared that consuming up to 2 tabelspoons of olive oil is heart healthy.  What the US government didn't include in that recommendation is the key words "extra virgin".  The reason they did this was so that they didn't discourage people from buying all the varieties of olive oil that are sold in stores.  Just another example that the government food recommendations, that includes the food pyramid, are NOT created to make you healthy.  Their main purpose is to encourage sales of the products that the US agriculture system produces.  It's extremely refreshing to learn from people who aren't from the US and aren't basing their knowledge on what the American government says is right.  In Italy, everyone knows what extra virgin means.  Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, I tend to get a bit fired up about these things lol.

Ciao!