I'm Traveling!

Not to Italy, mind you, but I'm on the road to Massachusetts for a visit with my sister which is always a very pleasant time.  I love where she lives with all the neat shops, art-y gallery type places, local restaurants rather than just all chains, locally grown produce, eggs, etc., etc.  So I'm really looking forward to it.

But today was 552 miles of driving.   Left West Virginia, travelled most of the way across Maryland and am now up in Pennsylvania.  Tomorrow I will go into New York and from there into Massachusetts.  So five states in 2 days isn't too bad!

Before I post today's pictures though, I'll post one of my latest cooking creations which was last night.  Since I had been packing and was sort of all a-twitter, I wanted something quick and easy.  I had bought a jar of roasted red peppers some time ago and kept thinking how I could use them.  Last night I just decided to take the plunge.  My original thought was to use them in some kind of sauce for over pasta but I didn't want to cook the pasta and I couldn't make up my mind if I would like just basically pasta with red peppers, roasted or not.  So I decided I would use up my last bit of good bread, sliced it into three small pieces and toasted them.  Before that, though, I took out one pepper (they were packed in olive oil with garlic) and put it in my new enamelled cast iron saucepan (which was pretty exciting - it's bright red!)  Then I used two forks to kind of tear it into smaller pieces - I hadn't wanted to put it on my cutting board to cut cause it was dripping oil.  Then I cut up several of the tiny, wrinkled black olives I bought a while back and which I love, put them in, and then added some minced up fresh basil which one of my neighbors has planted in the window boxes which are outside our building's ground floor windows.  Actually, that's what started this whole process - I had pinched off two tops from the two basil plants and wanted to use them before I left town.  I heated it up and it  was all looking and smelling pretty good.  I also toasted some pine nuts and grated up some aged parmesan.  I steamed some broccoli florets and seasoned them with some of the herbed salt January brought back to me from Hawaii.  Put the pepper mix on the little toasts, sprinkled the pine nuts over, and then the cheese on them and the broccoli.  Used a little drizzle of my almost gone and very precious Florentine olive oil and I have to say, I think it was delicious.  Basically bruschetta, I suppose, but the pine nuts and olives made it a little over the edge and serving it for dinner with the broccoli was a real nice change.  So here's the picture of that.

And I took this picture of West Virginia from the highway cause I was thinking how my cyber friend, Jean, keeps wishing I could take another shot of a particular one of the winter shots I took from the highway and I don't know that I'll ever be able to cause who knows for sure where it was.  But I knew for sure it wasn't on today's highway (different direction) but thought "well, I'll just take a picture anyway - it at least shows our lush green summer beauty".  And then figured, shoot, just take a "pastoral" type picture in each state.  So here they are.

Beautiful West Virginia (it was just starting to sprinkle on me and then came a deluge!)

Pretty beautiful Maryland, too, actually (and not a pretty sky here either...)

And a gorgeous farm (one of several in this area) in Pennsylvania taken as I was flying by at 70 mph!  And look at this sky - Pennsylvania wins best sky for the day...

I'm staying in Wilkes-Barre tonight.  Had a nice glass of wine and light supper at Applebee's, a tiny cookie and cup of tea at Starbucks (surprise!) and now I'm ready to crawl under the covers and wish there was something to watch on TV.  G'night...