Wish you were here, Tuncay!

Just a quick post until we get around to updating you with lots of photos of our adventures. We hiked and bush whacked for 5 hours through great heat yesterday to arrive at a tiny village where the one restaurant was fully booked yesterday and also closed today.

But we begged our way into the restaurant yesterday (and had our best meal so far) and somehow managed to get in to a truffle hunting tour combined with cooking show this morning in lieu of breakfast.

#ilovetruffles

Thank you, Tuncay & Tom

Back home again from a great weekend in DC. Especially Bresca was absolutely amazing!

Thanks, Tuncay and Tom, for putting up with us for three days and even sending us home with more fine foodz for on the road...

we're back!

We are back again and (as the photo clearly shows) bring with excitement to revive the ancient tradition of blogging about our exciting lives! 

In Memoriam

On August 18 at approximately 4:30am in the morning, our dear friend and trusted companion Miss Sylvia passed away. 

 

She had just had a joyful weekend with our friends Ghosh, Tuncay, and Oni, where she cheered us up each morning with the wonderful cups of espresso she produced. 

We are saddened beyond words by the fact that she is no more. Causes of death have been determined to be overzealous wiping of surfaces, not checking whether switches are in the off-position before the electricity turns on automatically at 4am, and the lack of a built-in fail switch. We can only imagine her painful last moments when she had heated up and spat out all water that was available to her, and she had no other option but to short circuit her motor and heating element.

Miss Sylvia came into our lives into 2006, thanks to an un-enjoyable TA position for professor Bland for extra cash. She survived the perilous 4-month journey to China in 2008. We missed her so much during her travels, that we never allowed her to travel without us again -- from then on, she traveled on the same plane as us, no matter the cost. She was a faithful companion in Germany and Virginia, despite the fact that we initially did not clean her as much as she liked. In the last years of her life, she divided her time between Williamsburg VA and Ithaca NY, settling down in Ithaca for good in the summer of 2020.

Miss Sylvia is survived by her grinder Rocky, her followers Frans and Anke, as well as the does-have-an-automatic-off-switch upstart fully-automatic-espresso-machine Jura.

Thanksgiving 2017

Tuncay invited us over for Thanksgiving --- something you do not want to say no to. We had very nontraditional Thanksgiving foods: amazing foie gras, wonderful meatz and cheeses for lunch, and a full dinner with sous vide duck (pictured above).



We started with pumpkin soup which was even better than it looked.



Then we had this beautiful salad with goat cheese.



And then there was the pièce de résistance: duck that was first sous vided, and then pan fried.



Also, veggies.

We are very thankful to Tuncay!

Intermezzo: Chicago

Apologies for the slow posting of holiday pictures. Last weekend we were in Chicago where we saw Soumyadip, Oni and Tuncay...



... and ate lots of wonderful food.







We also saw a little bit of the city.

Thanksgiving

Friends in Boston

The cast:



Oni



Dan



Shomo



Anke



Tuncay



a turkey...



... and Frans's academic great-grandfather.

Featuring:





Chocolate



Drowning orange men



Beer...

...and ridiculous amounts of amazing food.

Zoo

We visited Tuncay for some incredible food (no pics, even though it happened), and as an added bonus, we visited the zoo.

Calling it now

We may be a bit premature but we are calling it for Hilary right now. Oh, sorry, we meant Maraaya.



Just two months to go for the Eurovision.

P.S. We are also loving honorary European nation Australia.

P.P.S. is it just us or does Maraary look like our favorite Hilary (with only one l!)

Cornell get together

We drove up to DC for a mini-Cornell reunion, meeting up with some friends from grad school. We also took advantage of this opportunity to eat insane amounts of food. Even now, I am still in a bit of a food coma, so I will just leave you to contemplate the vast amounts of food we managed to put away.

The Pig

Tuncay knew that we needed to have brunch at The Pig before moving on to West Virginia.

After the amazing Little Pig Platter, consisting of three types of cold cuts (two of which are pictured above), bread, dates and olives, both A and I were very much looking forward to the waffle with charred pork belly, as we could not imagine what that would be like.



It was awesome.



Ellen had another favorite: eggs Benedict; and Tuncay had the amazingly tasty pork cheeks. I just had dinner, but am getting hungry just thinking about all this.

Washington DC

On our way to the snowy mountains in West Virginia, we stopped in Washington DC and visited Tuncay and Chad. No visit to DC is complete without stopping at Zenebach Injera.

The Pig!

No, I am not talking about Tuncay. It's the name of the restaurant he took us to for brunch!



They make their own cured meatz, and they do it well! Another recommendation.