WARNING! Graphic pictures. Don't keep reading if you have a sensitive stomach

It's been a quiet week.  The students all survived 10 day and are in good spirits.  On Wednesday, we hosted a forno dinner for the winners of the Geek Olympics.  The forno is the outdoor kitchen on campus.  Cooking at the forno is one of Ryan's favorite past times and he finds every excuse to incorporate forno dinners with work.  This time round the students requested American food so we did bbq chicken with potato salad, and it turned out great if I say so myself.

On Saturday night Ryan and I hosted a dinner party at our apartment for our business manager Silvia and her husband Sergio.  My thought had been to cook brisket but as it turns out the butcher had other plans for me.  Now, you have to imagine me at an Italian butcher.  My language skills are horrible in normal conversation and when it comes to asking a butcher for particular cuts of meat they are non-existant.  I made Ryan come with me to help but he also got stuck.  The end result was the two of us gesturing at various parts of our bodies while saying the names of animals hoping the butcher would get the idea.  Alas there was no brisket and the butcher suggested lamb instead.  I have a wonderful recipe for a roast leg of lamb so I agreed.  But again, things were lost in translation and instead of a nice 7lb leg of lamb I got this...

I had NO idea what to do with it and at first I didn't even know that they had given us the head.  When we got home and I unwrapped the butcher paper I literally screamed and ran across the apartment.  Ryan ended up skinning it and hacking it to pieces and then roasting it.  It turned out well in the end and we had the added bonus of a lamb's head which we used to prank Hannah.

Ryan says working with college students has lowered my maturity level.  I disagree.


This coming Wednesday we leave for Northern Italy.  We will visit Orvieto, Florence, Venice, and Arezzo and I get to lead several tours.  Students last semester told me that they really liked my tours because they were so laid back and not full of information.  (Hmmmm, hopefully they did not tell Dr. Hatlie that.)  Laid back lectures with little information don't go over so well with the spring students, so this time round I am doing a bit more prep work.  As a bonus I intend to make my Venice tour group try some horse sausage at an equine butcher we found last semester.  If I can't broaden their intellectual horizons, I can at least broaden their culinary ones.  Ryan's tours are of course always intellectual and interesting.