Today we stuck close to home. Tim did a few projects around the “house” and I finally cooked and photographed a meal for my Thinly Sliced Cucumber blog. It’s been over a month since my last post and I’m itching to get back into it. There will be some challenges if I plan on returning to my once or twice a week post schedule, but I think its feasible. After some initial frustration with my photography set up I cruised through the cooking part and was reminded how much I love the whole process.
Portable food photography set-up
Despite its small size, the airstream kitchen it quite functional and I’m determined to cook everything I used to back at the house. Today I kept it simple and made a pasta with white wine sauce and fresh sugar peas.
The kitchen in actionBefore dinner, we took a little walk on the trail that loops around the campground. So many huge trees around here! This one was rather impressive. I tried to put my arms around it but as you can see I didn’t even come close to reaching.
Tree hugging
On the day we arrived here we were intrigued by a stand of large trees with flaky bark. A trip to Wikipedia told us that they’re Sycamore trees. A familiar enough name, but since they don’t grow as far north as VT we had never seen them in person. Check out the cool bark on these guys…
Sycamore trees
The trail follows the river and we stopped so Phineas could take his daily swim. Our campground is located on the Allegheny river downstream from the Kinzua Dam that we visited yesterday. It was kind of cool to think that all this water passed through the dam.
Phineas getting his exercise
I spotted these delightful pink flowers near the river’s edge. I was sure they were a flower called Butterfly Weed, but have only ever seen them in bright orange. Another Internet search later and my suspicions were confirmed. The orange variety is only found as a cultivated plant (how I’ve always seen it), and this one is a wild species called Swamp Weed or asclepias incarnata. It grows in abundance in wet areas of the northeast. I may not be able to do any actual gardening while on the road, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to expand my plant knowledge!
Swamp Weed
The day ended with dinner in front of our first campfire. I know, I know… one and a half weeks in and this is our first campfire. What can I say, it’s been hot out and we really like to hang out on our couch in the evening :)
Fireside dining
The best part about our campfire was that we got to roast marshmallows!
