The Last Two Weeks in Three Paragraphs (sorta)

Hi Everyone!

It's been a while...here's what's happened in the last two weeks:

1. Big meetings at work
2. Dad came to Switzerland
3. Dad and I went to Italy for a few days with a friend, they both got stuck for an extra four days because of a certain temperamental Icelandic volcano named Eyjafjallajokull. Yeah, you read right. 
4. My friend Jon came to visit Lugano from Paris
5. Eating. Eating. Eating. Eating. Eating. Food. Eating. 

Few! What have I baked since then? Well, for Dad a flour-less dark chocolate cake with brandied cherries and whipped cream, and after I got back, strawberry-rhubarb compote, hazelnut cake, parmeson cheese crackers and chocolate-banana muffins, and I'm working on making my own vanilla extract. Whew, I know. And I still need to post the red velvet cake! Would you forgive me if I directed you to lovely Joy's website where I found it? Then I can post a picture and tell you the substitutions I made: yogurt and milk instead of buttermilk, vanilla sugar instead of vanilla extract and a package of french leavening instead of baking powder (soda?). See? Easy...

Telling you all of what I ate will be harder...budino di riso, nutella, chestnut cake, apple tart, pasta, cheese, pasta, cheese, octopus salad, chicken liver pate (I should have made a record)...bistecca alla fiorentina (giant t-bone steak specially prepared in the florentine style), stinco (roasted forearm of a pig), fresh pasta with truffles, tiny tortellini in broth,  tortellini filling served separately, prosciutto, mozzarella di bufala, fresh pecorino, vitello tonato...the list goes on.

This is not even including the "advanced" 10-course meal I ate in Modena at a restaurant called l'Osteria Francescana, where we were served risotto flavored with (but not actually including) oysters, raw fish with (and I'm not joking) smoke, pan-roasted black cod with black tomato sauce, a soup inspired by "the flavors of the earth" including truffles and snails, beer (!), several different wines including one made of walnuts (which I skipped, of course) and a POTATO SOUFFLE, served in a potato skin, with vanilla cream. Let's not forget the roasted, square marshmallows on wooden sticks served after the dessert, and the tiny tiny cream puffs and assorted cakes served after that. As a gift after the dinner, we were given bottles of extremely aged balsamic vinegar, for which Modena is famous.

Would you believe that those to paragraphs are only a fraction of the total amount of food I ate in the last two weeks? More to come when I get my pictures off my phone.