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It's been a long time since I've written. I'm living in Soragna, a tiny town sort of near Parma. My town has a park, a fruit store, a bakery, a bodega, a castle, and a few other random things. it feels like a real place where regular folks just live, and that's nice. I've been cooking here for a little less than three weeks now? something like that. I feel better than i was feeling at my old job.

I remember going to the Brooklyn Public Library sometime in early March this year, before I started culinary school, and looking through a book by Jacques Pepin (La Technique). In this book I found an interesting way of rolling out and cutting fresh pasta. I made a version of this pasta for a couple friends of mine a few days later. A month or two after that, I found myself watching Jacques Pepin cook live right in front of me. Now, I'm living in Italy and using that same Jacques Pepin method of making fresh pasta to feed tagliatelli to Italians. This is something that I feel proud of.

I felt a little low last night because my chef gave me a huge amount of vegetables to dice, and he challenged me to finish within ten minutes. I'm still not as fast as I want to be, and as my ten minute time limit passed, my chef came up next to me and showed me how he is able to cut vegetables extremely quick. I know that it's unrealistic for me to expect to be as fast as my head-chef who has been working in kitchens since he was fifteen, but the truth is that I do want to be just as fast as him or anyone else. practice practice practice...

A waiter was listening to a soccer game on the radio in our kitchen, and when his team scored a goal, he danced around like that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine dances all funny flailing her arms and legs around. He didn't imitate her intentionally. It was just his way of celebrating a goal. I can never really share information like this with anyone because nobody here speaks English. My chef speaks a little English actually, and that's been really helpful for me in terms of knowing what's going on in the kitchen and participating. But I doubt he's seen that particular Seinfeld episode.

My chef is a huge guy from Naples. HUGE. He looks like Charles Barkley. He's the sort of guy who will give you a friendly pat on the back and you'll accidentally fall a few feet forward. He's a nice guy.

I roll out sheets of pasta dough three feet long. When someone orders a pasta dish, I take a handful of dough and get to work. When lots of people order pasta all at once, I feel happy and busy, and I make 35 tortelli in a few minutes, and they look nice.

When I was in between jobs I ate burrata cheese in front of the Adriatic Sea in the town of Bari. I slept on the beach one night with another traveling cook and his friends. I saw Southern Italian folk music in the Salento Peninsula, wild tambourines and old men singing and violins and accordions. People danced till sunrise, others too tired to keep dancing slept all throughout the town square and it looked like a dream, so many strangers draped sleeping over fountains and church steps while others danced and sang.