What's New with Us: 2011

OK, here is what you get when you have two Thanksgiving dinners, one small oven, no Wal-Mart, and one artisan cucina ;)  One turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, and cranberry chutney for Thanksgiving day and all the same plus rolls, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy, pecan & pumpkin pies, and a pumpkin roll for Saturday.  Throw-in a busted eye on Tuesday and a double ear infection on Wednesday and you get one mama mia of a week!

Can't buy Pepridge farm dried cornbread ...so corn bread from scratch and now drying out.  I did this twice -our team dinner and for our Italian friends.

Again, can't buy dried apples ...must learn to make my own.  Can any one say "sticky"!  It took awhile and had to clean my oven afterward :0 (a necessary ingredient for a recipe)

OK, corn bread is not drying out! So Troy suggested the fans and drying racks.  Bravo Troy!

The start of more cornbread for dinner #2 and the cranberry chutney

Turkey #1 -too dry!!!!  Brinning didn't work.  W/o ice available (like at a gas station in US) I had no way to keep the Turkey while it sat in the brine and a big tub ...won't fit in the frig.  So, have to rethink the next turkey.

Mom's light rolls -Perfetto!!!!

Mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes!

Much better -nice and juicy

Next!

Sweet potato casserole.  There are not sweet potatoes here ...so this was a rare treat to share!

Corn bread stuffing, my family's tradition.   One for the team and one for the Italians

Make-shift green bean casserole -X's 2.  Can't find any of the same ingredients but the beans ...I have to say, I found an amazingly similar result!

The kid table

The kitchen in full bloom :)

Speaking of full bloom, these beauties were a hostess gift from a friend.  Lovely!

...and Rowen's gift was snazzy red slippers.  She wore them to bed :)

Troy has become a hiker.  He has been on three with the language school.  The latest hike was to the mountains near lake Garda.  In the pictures are his teachers and some students and the sites -of course.  Enjoy.

This is a torte our neighbor Giusy brought over.  Really Italian from a real Italian!

We carved pumpkins with friends recently.  It was our new friends first time.  The kids were not all that impressed ...but their mama was :)

Noah and Emmanuelle

Martina -cute as she can be

The finished project!

My friend Francesca with her pumpkin

Tocati is a festival where countries are invited to Verona to share about themselves.  There was a lot of activity in the city this weekend!

You can get a sense of the crowd and city life from this picture.

A brass band playing "When The Saints Come Marching In" ushered in a parade to kick-off the weekend.

The parade displayed the countries taking part -this is Mexico (I think)

In front of a famous cathedral -Sant'Anastasia.

Acrobats from Taiwan amazing us with jump rope skills -who knew that could be done!?!

Don't know who these folks were -or where they were from but Rowen sure liked dancing while watching them.

A sport from Mexico?  Interesting.					Here is a link to see more -warning it is in Italian :)  Kinda fun to look over (briefly) http://www.tocati.it/eventi.php

How Italians move

Look closely ...there is a ladder from the truck to the balcony.  A side note, our stuff went in the elevator or was walked up the stairs :)

First day of school + new bunk beds = Awesome Day for Noah and Rowen!!