Leaving Condove

Sad to say, but the movers arrived this morning and started to box everything up.  By Wednesday we turn in the key to the house and depart for the last time as residents.  It is a wonderful little town.  Everyone has been so welcoming and helpful.  We are very disappointed to leave.

Below you'll see a selection of photo's that highlight the town and its many events.  A few memories to capture the fives years we have lived here.  We will certainly return for frequent visits.  Our new place is only a few mile up the road.  But it still is sad to leave.

EICMA 2011 - aka Milano Motorcycle Show

November 12 I went the the motorcycle show in Milan.  It is a fun event to see whats new and take some photo's of cool stuff.

I went there a couple years ago and had a good time.  It is amazingly large and is really more that a consumer product event.  About half the event is component suppliers promoting their businesses to the industry and a lot of emerging market manufactures looking for a way to enter the mainstream first world markets.  You see a lot of knockoffs of 1970's Honda small displacement products.  Considering the stuff Honda made back then was pretty good, its probably a good approach for a new company.  (I saw some nice examples of Honda CT70 Minitrails which would still be fun to have!)

The are a lot of accessories and clothing on display as well.  I saw some pretty cool helmets including a nice one from Bell.  (but with the colors inverted...  black with a white stripe) I am a little temped but it is a little too expensive.

And of course the is the usual festival food when its time for a break.  A Bratwurst with kraut and a beer in my case.  Perhaps not as Italian as some other option but it was good!

Along with the normal range of new 2012 motorcycle products there was a nice selection of scooters, custom bikes, race bikes, and vintage motorcycles.

Thanksgiving in Italy... with some invention.

We actually missed Thanksgiving day because it is a normal work day  here.  So we shifted our celebration to the following Saturday.  The second adaptation is the main course.  Whole turkey see hard to get here.  One year we bought a selection of turkey pieces (a leg, a breast, a wing, and some turkey livers) and "assembled" a half of turkey.  It worked pretty well considering it is just Queen Bee and I.

This year we went with a large chicken, 7 pound capon, which isn't really much smaller then the turkey we would normally get for the family (usually around 11 pounds)

So along with the chicken we had the normal sides...  peas, stuffing, mashed potatoes.

The trick part was the cranberry sauce.  Cranberry sauce does not exist here and it is pretty fundamental for Thanksgiving.   We had not thought ahead to bring some over last time we were in the US.  But I had brought some dried cranberries that Queen Bee used to use in her normal lunch salad.  F=Somewhere along the way these dropped off her menu so we still had a couple bags of them.

She check the web to see if there any recipes for sauce or some suitable side dish using dried cranberries.  But no luck.  She did not that allspice seemed to be a common ingredient for some cranberry dishes.  So we decided to wing it and create some thing.  My guess for something that might approach the correct texture and taste good was...

- One bag dried cranberries
- Port (which we happened to have sitting around)
- Brown sugar
- Allspice

...  Perfect!  It was probably the best cranberry sauce we ever had.  It will now become our holiday standard for the future.  Live and learn as they say.

So so managed to have a very successful day with lots of good food (by the way, the capon was really good as well).

Sorry, no photo's.