By Laura Newsome
Taveling is a feast for the senses, and no other country inspires a feast quite
like Italy. This robust Mediterranean land has given rise to gilded cathedrals
and some of the world’s most celebrated art, but Italy’s best known
cultural exports have names like risotto, rigatoni, lasagna and Tiramisu.
If the greatest way to tour Italy is through your taste buds, and food always
tastes better when you prepare it yourself, then perhaps the best view of the
“Old Country” is from behind the counter of an Italian kitchen.
When it came time to celebrate their 40th birthdays, Janice Hughes and her husband,
David, both DCs, decided to make it an occasion they would not soon forget.
“We had the choice of having a party, which is something you do for other
people, or doing something for ourselves,” she says. Not surprisingly,
the Hughes’ decided to celebrate the landmark occasion in style. David
Hughes embarked on a much anticipated ski vacation, and Janice began planning
a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a cooking school in Italy.
“I wanted to spend my 40th birthday expanding and enhancing my life with
food and wine, and where better to go than Italy for great food and wine,”
she says. While living in Canada, the Hughes became acquainted to Umberto Menghi,
a world-renowned chef who has five-star restaurants in Vancouver, Whistler and
British Columbia. His sister Marietta, also an accomplished chef, just happened
to teach at a cooking school called Villa Delia in the Tuscan region of Italy,
just outside of Pisa.
“I’ve always loved food, but I had never done anything like this,”
says Janice. After visiting traditional tourist haunts in Venice, Florence and
Rome as an adventurous backpacker in her early 20s, Janice decided she wanted
to experience the old world in a different way.
In November of 2001, she embarked on a 10-day culinary journey and joined a
group of 10 other cooking enthusiasts at Villa Delia. The group convened every
morning in the big Italian kitchens of the school, where they learned how to
make seven to 10 new dishes every day, including everything from homemade risotto
to bold and flavorful pasta sauces. “It was just an absolute treat,”
says Janice. “Each morning there was a different theme, and we often ate
for lunch what we prepared that morning. At the villa they grow their own herbs
and olives and produce their own wine, so everything was very fresh.”
In the afternoons the school took cooking related trips to popular hotspots
and small towns off the beaten path, including Pisa, Lucca, Florence, the San
Vivaldo monastery (considered one of the most sacred places outside of Jerusalem),
the mediaeval town of San Gimignano and the ultra-exclusive Sassicaia winery.
“We went to a lot of local towns that aren’t necessarily tourist
towns, where you can shop for handmade Italian silks and leather,” she
says.
Coming home with a handwritten cookbook of recipes translated from the Italian
instructions of her teachers, Hughes began dazzling her husband with her newly
discovered culinary talents. “The first two months after I came back my
husband thought he had died and gone to heaven because I was cooking from five-star
recipes,” she says.
Although life eventually intervened, and she no longer has time to cook luxurious
meals every day, Janice says her well-worn cookbook is often in use. “The
Italian food over there is very different from what we have here—they
don’t use all the heavy sauces,” she says. “Everything is
all-natural; the sauces are cleaner, they use beds of fresh herbs and homemade
broths made from pure vegetable oil. The Italians eat healthy but also well;
they eat dessert after meals, but only a little bit.”
Janice will always cherish the new skills and old-world recipes she brought
back from Italy, but she says her favorite memories were experiencing the quiet
sights and sounds of the Mediterranean countryside. “My favorite thing
was waking up in the early morning in an Italian villa and looking out on the
olive groves, which seemed to stretch on forever.”
After building one of the largest chiropractic practices in Canada, Janice taught
chiropractic philosophy and practice management at Palmer College of Chiropractic.
She is now director of the Master’s Circle’s Winner’s Circle,
and engages other chiropractors in the profession through life-altering learning
experiences and seminars. Janice will soon be bringing the entire Master’s
Circle management program to Life University’s senior students.
Janice and David now live and practice in Boulder, Colo., where they enjoy great
food, good wine and all the heart-pounding excitement the mountain landscape
offers.
As a person who follows her personal and professional dreams, Hughes has been
marking inspirational experiences off her “things to do” list for
years. “It’s about dreaming big,” she says. “What is
your ideal practice and your ideal life? Are you on track with your values,
and how can the income you generate create those dreams? It’s about making
plans and dreams, and then starting to figure out the when, why and where to
make them happen. It’s about gaining experiences that help you live a
more fulfilling, better life.”