Eat Me.

Anything you can do we can do vegan.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Back to Nature: Brewery Tour and Tubing

Yesterday Amos and I partook in and activity that everyone in the South has apparently been doing since the dawn of time: tubing down a lazy river on a hot summer's day. Tubing was really really really relaxing. We had like 17 people in our group and it was funny to see all our friends floating around in huge inner tubes with just their arms, legs and heads sticking out. Besides the cute little green and brown snake that decided to say hello by swimming up onto my stomach everything went pretty smoothly. My car stopped at this place called "Hog Heaven" before we reached Wayne's World (the tubing outfitters) that had these really good fresh cut french fries. Luckily they were fried in vegetable oil not pig lard!

I almost forgot to mention we first visited the Abita Brewery in Abita Springs, LA. In New Orleans Abita is probably the most-drank beer in the whole city (discounting all the tourist bars). Abita produces an amber, wheat, golden and light beer. They have Turbodog (which is like the chocolate milkshake of beer) and Andygator (which is like the highest proof beer in existence). Restoration Ale is a beer they made where 1$ of each six pack goes to rebuilding. They have a fall fest beer, a pecan beer, a raspberry beer called Purple Haze and a strawberry beer brewed only during the spring strawberry harvest.

The Abita Brewery tour is free and they make it feel like hanging out at a friend's house on a Saturday afternoon. First they let you in this air conditioned room with six beers on tap and mountains of plastic cups (plus their root beer) and let you sit in there for about 45 minutes. Then on to the brewery tour which was hot as balls and lasted about 15 minutes. Ok - maybe it was about 25. Then back to the room with the beer where we were encouraged to hang out for however long we wanted. If you are in the area I highly suggest taking the tour. Or if you can't make it just try their beer - it is really good and I think trying the different types of beer available in the little air-conditioned room is the real tour.

But on to the food experimentation part of this post. In preparation of the trip I decided to make some cookies to bring along. I definitely got my cookie mojo back. No more cookies that taste like bread. Here's how I did it: Butter (unmeasured amount) plus 1 cup evaporated cane juice. Thawed banana, 1tsp salt, 1 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp vanilla extract. 2 cups flour (more or less). Then some almond milk. Next I divided the dough in half and put some cinamon and 1/4 cup of cocoa in the first half. Then in the other half I added some oats, coconut flakes and whatever was left over in the bag of chocolate chips I have been eating out of for the past week. Baked at 375 for 11-13 minutes and they were super perfect. I chilled them in the freezer really quick (it was about 85 in the house) and put them in the cooler for after our tubing trip yesterday.

Barely any measuring and they were perfect. Who knows. It seems things like that work best.

P.S. Mercedes of Desert Candy asked me to make the following corrections to my August 24th post: She is a singular person (I referred to her as a "they" since I didn't take the time to read about her) and she uses a pre-freeze bowl on her Cuisinart not the kitchenaid attachment as I thought after seeing the pictures. Sorry Mercedes!

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