Recipe: Gluten Free Vegan Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

Before I started exclusively vegan baking, I loved making chocolate chocolate chip cookies. The kind I made were small and very chocolatey and came from a healthy cookbook. I have not made them in years, but started thinking about them today when I was in the mood for something chocolate.

Of course I would need to veganize them, but I also decided to make them gluten free. My mom is gluten intolerant and I am going to visit her next weekend and wanted to come up with something new to take to her. (Mom: pretend you didn’t read that so it is a surprise!)

The cookies ended up tasting even better than the original, in part because I used almond extract and in part because I added a bit of soy milk. The original recipe was always somewhat lacking in moisture.

I made these using my toaster oven, which is great in the summer because it doesn’t heat my whole apartment. The recipe should work just as well in a traditional oven.

Vegan Gluten Free Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies
Yield: 18 cookies

Ingredients:
1/2 cup brown sugar firmly packed
1/4 cup Earth Balance, softened (or other vegan margarine)
1/2 teaspoon almond extract (or vanilla extract if you prefer)
1 flaxseed egg (1 Tablespoon ground flaxseed whisked briskly in small bowl with 3 Tablespoons water)
1 cup Meister’s Gluten Free All Purpose Flour*
3 Tablespoon unsweetened cocoa
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon soy milk (or other non-dairy milk)
1/2 cup vegan chocolate chips

Preparation:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In large bowl, cream brown sugar and Earth Balance together until light and fluffy. Add the extract and flaxseed egg and mix well.

Add the flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt and mix well. Stir in the soy milk until combined. Stir in chocolate chips.

Drop by heaping tablespoons onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 8-9 minutes or until set. Cool for one minute on the pan and then move to wire cookie rack.

* Meister’s already includes xanthan gum in it, so if you use another kind like Bob’s Red Mill, you will probably need to add xanthan gum, per the package instructions.

This recipe is adapted from the Pillsbury Fast and Healthy Cookbook, 1998.


Happy 1st Birthday Paducah Kitty!!

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Today my littlest baby kitty turns one year old. It would be difficult to believe if she didn’t look like such a full grown cat. When we first found her on the side of the road in Elizabethtown, Illinois, she weighed only three pounds and was afflicted with fleas, ear mites, and roundworm. She has since grown to be a big, strong, healthy cat.

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It is funny to think that E and I once worried that she would be hurt by the other cats and would not be able to hold her own. Now, except maybe for Jiblets, she is the toughest cat we have. Here is a video of her playing/fighting with Eggy, who she is now bigger than (there is some general cuteness at the beginning before the attack):

It is only about 11:00 in the morning and Paduacah has already had an exciting birthday thus far. She has enjoyed some sun:
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Got a kiss from her older sister:
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And played on the stairs (which once upon a time we worried were too tall for her to climb):
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Now she is sleeping, which will probably last until late afternoon:
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Enjoy your day, kitty! You’ve come a long way!
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#17: Go Skydiving

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Today, in honor of my birthday, I jumped out of an airplane from 14,000 feet above beautiful Illinois farm country, completing #17 on my list of 101 in 1001. We had originally been scheduled to go last night, but storms in the area pushed us until this morning. We got there a little before 7:30 a.m. and had to wait awhile before we watched a video to encourage us to buy a video of our jump (which I think was a pointless exercise since everyone in our small group had already bought the DVD). Then we met with our tandem partner and got suited up.

We had the option to wear a jumpsuit, which of course I did because then I looked like a true skydiver. Plus, it was really cold at 14,000 feet so I was glad to have it on. The cold was actually quite a shock, given how pleasantly warm it was on the ground. After the jumpsuit, I was fitted with all the gear that would be used to attack me with my tandem partner. For those unfamiliar, people who are doing their first jumps have to do a tandem. You are attached to a very experienced skydiver/instructor who handles all the important things and lets you just enjoy the jump.

After that we were ready to go! Prince E and I were in the same plane, which was good. He ended up going out first. I was not nervous at all the whole time and I am not sure why. I am normally nervous about a lot more silly things that jumping out of an airplane. For example, having to go to a work function that will require a lot of small talk makes me anxious, but jumping out of a plane and free falling did not even cause my heart to beat fast. I am by no means an adrenaline junkie (I don’t even do roller coasters), so I am unsure where my sense of calm was coming from.

Once the others started going out of the plane, everything went very quickly and it was my turn. The initial jump out of the plane can be likened to going down a steep hill on a roller coaster (I have been on one in the past). My instructor had to move my head to get me to look up at the video/camera guy. For some reason I kept wanting to look down at the ground (which looked really cool). I could feel my skin moving on my face, which was a weird sensation and tried to smile nicely for my pictures. I didn’t even realize until I saw the video how many times we spun around.

Before I knew it, my instructor was signaling me that it was time to pull the rip cord to open the parachute, something we did together. Once the parachute opened, there was a bit of a jolt and then I was upright. We floated around a bit and then my instructor decided to spin around. I immediately told him to stop because it was making me dizzy. It reminded me of being on the tilt-a-whirl. Instead, he pointed out landmarks in the horizon. Things like Iowa. And Wisconsin. Pretty crazy what you can see from that high up. The trip to the ground I think was about 8-10 minutes, but was over before I knew it and we went in for our landing.

While waiting around afterward to get the DVD and photos put onto disc, I was feeling a bit queasy so I bought a pop, thinking the carbonation would settle my stomach. After we got into the car and pulled out of the place, I really started feeling sick and had Prince E hand me the trash can. Without going into too much detail, I will say that I threw up several times on the way home. Prince E asked, “So that is why you don’t go on roller coasters, right?” Uh, yeah. I am thinking it was all the spinning that did me in, rather than the falling, but I am not too sure.

I have not let that end result dampen my overall experience, however, and I really did have an awesome time.

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The End of the 30 Whole Days Challenge

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Today is the final day of the 30 Whole Days Challenge. While I was not perfect and did not eat whole foods 100% of the time (there were two instances with french fries and a couple of whole wheat bagels), I am more than proud of myself for my ability to stick to the plan. In the summary below you will see some similar themes to my thoughts after one week.

The Good:
Smoothies for breakfast are the best!!! This is a really great thing to have in the morning and really keeps me from being hungry until lunchtime. I managed to even make the time between breakfast and lunch a bit longer without losing my mind. The best thing about smoothies is that you can really just throw a bunch of things together, taste it, and adjust accordingly. I like not having to exactly follow a recipe. My most frequent combination was frozen bananas, rice milk, ground flaxseed, and peanut butter. The only downside to the smoothies is the clean-up.

Not having cheese was not as hard as I thought it would be. I never really craved cheese throughout the 30 days, which surprised me because I have often craved it in the past. I think it is one of those foods, though, that the more you have it, the more you want it, so I guess by cutting it out completely I didn’t want it anymore.

Salads are better if you don’t call them salads. I discovered that I love taking baby spinach and mixing it with salsa. I also like taking a mixture of brown rice and black beans and mixing it with baby spinach. I am just not a fan of the word salad because it makes me think of bland lettuce with a tomato or two. Not so fun.

Cooking can be fun if you take the pressure of yourself to make it perfect. It also helped that I was only making things for me, so if I messed them up, the husband would not starve.

Bananas are awesome. (although I already knew that)

Eating Out. I finally went to eat at Sweet Tomatoes, which was quite good, although a bit pricey for a salad (there’s that word again!) bar. The photo above is the salad that I ate there. I also managed to stay mostly on plan at stir-fry restaurant (the oil was the only thing item not on the approved list).

My husband was quite supportive during the whole thing and although he did get a lot of fast food during the last month, he didn’t try to get me to join in. My two french fry lapses were (1) because I was craving fried food for three days and finally succumbed, and (2) we had to hurry from work to see Glee Live and I made the conscious decision to just grab some french fries.

The Bad:

Cravings. I really craved bread a few times. One time I made a small brown rice flat bread and a couple of times I had a whole wheat bagel. Certainly not unhealthy in either case. There was also the fried food craving I discussed above. I know there are healthy options if you are craving chocolate or bread, but what can you do to stem a fried food craving other than have fried food?

Cooking is exhausting. I already went to the store to buy food for this week and I went back to some old prepared standbys because I am just tired of cooking. For that same reason, I had the same lunch several days in a row. While it is good to use up leftovers, it can also make for boring food.

This challenge made me obsess over food. I don’t like thinking about food all day long, but I really had to with this eating plan, especially early on. I had to make sure I had all the meals and snacks planned out, I had to obsessively check the contents of anything that I bought to make sure there was not added oil, salt, or sweetener. I have been doing a daily photo of myself and nearly all of them from this month were of me holding or eating some kind of food. (see below)

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Overall I am glad that I did the challenge, but I do not think that it is something that I care to keep up all the time. Certainly I will be limiting my processed food from now on, but I will be having some. My goal is to find a good balance between the two. Before the challenge I was nearly all processed and during the challenge I was eating nearly no processed. I think that a diet of mostly whole foods with some processed foods is probably a more realistic long term goal for me.


30 Whole Days Challenge: Wk 1 Done

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I made it through week one of the 30 Whole Days challenge!* Here are my general thoughts from the first week:

1. Cooking is exhausting and time consuming when you have to prepare everything yourself. I ended up having a lot more spinach salads than I really wanted to this week, just because I was so tired of being in the kitchen preparing things. My tiredness/laziness has given me the chance to come up with some interesting stuff on my own. For example, the concoction above which is baby spinach, peas, and orange slices.

2. I like a lot of fruits and vegetables that I didn’t know that I liked. Among them are mandarin oranges and beets.

3. Smoothies for breakfast are awesome. I’ve tried several iterations, some with spinach, some with just fruit, etc. and they all keep me energized throughout the morning. I haven’t had caffeine in several months, but this gives me the kind of boost that I was used to from coffee. I also like the fact that if I make a large enough portion I can sip on it throughout the morning.

4. I am more dedicated that I thought. My husband got french fries a few times this week and pizza once and I was not at all tempted. I will admit that I did have a sip of his soy Frappuccino from Starbucks, but resisted getting one of my own. I am very excited they have them with soy now.

5. I feel good. I think I am sleeping more soundly (a shift in my work schedule giving me an extra 30 minutes of sleep hasn’t hurt either). I also lost about three pounds this week, which is a nice bonus. Although I would not say I am bursting with energy, I also do not feel lethargic like I did when I was eating so much crap.

There is probably more I am not thinking of, but those are my general thoughts thus far. I think that a week of doing something is not that difficult and the real challenge is still to come the rest of the month.

* Yes, I know that it has been over a week, but I’ve been busy. See #1 above.


30 Whole Days Challenge: Days 2-4

Rather than posting all of my food on here each day, I thought I would just post every few days of the challenge and give you the highlights.

Sunday: Day 2

I felt really tired during the middle part of the day and ended up laying in the bed with E and the cats and watching TV for a bit, although I didn’t actually nap. I imagine the tiredness was some kind of withdrawal symptom, but I am not sure.

I spent the rest of the day in the kitchen. I made my own mango salsa! It was a lot of work and I would be must happier to just buy the stuff in the jar, although I did have quite a sense of accomplishment afterward. I chopped jalapeno, onions, mango, and tomatoes, which took forever. Especially because I took one look at the green onion and immediately had to Google “hot to chop green onion.”

Actually, I have been Googling a lot of weird (for me) stuff the past few days and I am sure it is really throwing the auto-advertising program for a loop. They are used to me searching things like “brownie recipes,” and instead I am searching for things like “how to dry roast spices” and “what to do with raw cashew butter.”

Here is the salsa, adorning some asparagus:

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In addition to the salsa, I also made some brown rice and black bean burgers (see above) to have for dinner on the following day. The burgers turned out okay, but were too dry. My husband says to add oil next time, but I would like to come up with something better than that solution. The ingredients were just mashed brown rice, mostly mashed black beans, and paprika. What do you think I should add to make them moister?

I also made a few smoothies during the day, one my own concoction that I created for Monday’s breakfast. Here it is:

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Oh My Darlin’ Smoothie

Makes one fairly large serving or two regular sized servings.

Ingredients:

4 clementines, peeled and separated
2 cups frozen pineapple chunks
1/2 cup rice (or other non-dairy milk)

What to do:

Blend in food processor or blender until smooth.

The flavor is great, although it is a bit more pulpy (pulpier?) than I would normally like. It was a great pick-me-up for a Monday morning.

Monday: Day 3

Starting off the day with my Oh My Darlin’ smoothie was good. I made the full recipe, so there was a lot of smoothie and it took me awhile to drink it all as I worked. That served to stave off my hunger for a bit longer than it would if I just ate something quickly first thing in the morning.

For lunch I had some leftover mini quinoa burgers, some black beans, and some applesauce. I found myself really hungry a couple of hours later and had a clementine and a Larabar.

On my walk home from work I had a banana because I knew when I got home it was going to take time for me to make my dinner. Typically I get home very hungry, which makes me crabby and quick to grab fast food. By having a pre-dinner snack, I was able to make it through the 25 minutes or so it took to make the dinner without feeling like I was going to faint from hunger. (Yes, I am dramatic when I am hungry).

For dinner I had the aforementioned meal with asparagus pictured above. The mango salsa was delicious, I must say. I ended up cutting the burger into small pieces and mixing it up with the salsa to make the burger more palatable.

Later that evening, I made myself another smoothie for breakfast on Day 4, this time using Happy Herbivore’s Neapolitan Smoothie recipe. I also made my homemade larabar-inspired winniebars.

Rounding out the evening, I stayed up past my bedtime to watch the Blackhawks tie up their series with Vancouver. Go Hawks!

Tuesday: Day 4

Because I stayed too late last night, I was pretty tired this morning, but the smoothie helped wake me up.

For lunch I had some leftover salsa mixed with dry black bean and rice burgers and a banana. It was not very filling, however, and I ended up having two clementines during the afternoon.

On my walk home I had a half of a homemade winniebar. I have not yet had dinner tonight, still trying to cool off from the walk home. (I’m not hungry when I’m hot). I am looking forward to making a peanut butter cup smoothie (only with cashew butter) for my breakfast for tomorrow. I made one on Sunday and it was super yummy.

So far my thoughts on this challenge are that it is a lot of work, even though I am eating a lot of leftovers. I am also finding myself thinking about food all day long, which I don’t really like.


Recipe: Cashew Winniebars

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I made my first recipe! This is an exciting day for me as I have always wanted to make something up on my own, but never knew how. I decided to start simple – I wanted to recreate my favorite bars, which are just whole ingredients pressed together without anything else added. Since I made some cashew butter yesterday and wanted to use it all up, I thought this was a great idea to try out. They ended up pretty close on the cashew cookie flavor of the store-bought bars, but the consistency is completely different.

First of all, you need cashew butter. You can either buy raw cashew butter at a health food store or, a more inexpensive option is to make it yourself.

Making cashew butter:
Makes a good size amount of cashew butter (sorry to be vague, but I didn’t measure it)
Ingredients –
2 cups raw cashews

(Yes, you can make it will oil and salt, but I made mine with just the cashews and it was fabulous).

What to do -
1. Place the cashews on a cookie sheet and cook them for about 20-25 minutes at about 170 degrees. Check on it regularly, give it a stir, and take it out when it is golden brown. May be more or less time depending on your oven.

2. Put the cashews in your food processor and process. For a long time. Feel free to stop and give your processor a break if need be. Don’t be freaked out if your cashews turn into powder. That happened to me too. You just have to keep processing it until you have a consistency more like natural peanut butter.

It will look like this:
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Making the bars:
Makes 3 bars
Ingredients –
3 Medjool dates, pits removed
20-25 cashews (you can use more or less depending on how nutty you want your bars to be)
3 Tablespoons cashew butter

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* Feel free to use more/less of the ingredients if you want to. I have not really experimented in terms of different amounts to see what might work better. I have an inkling that more dates, less cashew butter may be good, too.

What to do -
Cut the dates into small pieces.
Put the cashews in the food processor for about 10 pulses or until they are into small pieces.

Put the dates, cashews and cashew butter into a bowl. Now is the fun part. Combine all the ingredients by hands, mixing them up well to incorporate the ingredients together. It will feel kind like you are playing with Play-doh. If all the cashew bits don’t combine, don’t stress. You can use them for something else. It just means that I told you to put too many cashews in it.

Here is what my mixture looked like when combined:
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Once you have mixed it all to your liking, you want to form it into bars. The first time I made just one, so I formed it in my hands and that was fine. Since this recipe makes three, though, it might be easier to just press it into part of a baking pan.

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You can then cut it into bars or, if you prefer, refrigerate it so that it firms up a bit. I also imagine that if you used less cashew butter and/or more dates you might get a firmer bar. Feel free to experiment and let me know.

Enjoy!


30 Whole Days Challenge: Day 1

Day one of the 30 Whole Days Challenge went well. I started the day by heading to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s to stock up on food. On the way, I had a Larabar and some water. I spent some extra time at the stores, trying to find some new things and also checking labels to make sure everything was made from only whole ingredients. Surprisingly, my grocery bill was not much different cost-wise what it normally is when I buy lots of pre-made veggie burgers and similar products. I had thought that by adding so much more fresh produce, the bill would be higher.

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When I got home from the store I was starving and ate a banana while I was putting all the groceries away. In fact, I was hungry quite a bit during the day and found myself needing to snack a lot. Luckily I had a fridge full of food so I snacked on mandarin oranges and raisins.

For lunch, I made a salad that included spinach, roasted asparagus, strawberries, and some leftover kidney beans. It was pretty yummy.

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Eating whole foods means that things take a long longer to make. Normally a few minutes to heat up a frozen veggie burger becomes a half hour to make the patties, not to mention the cooking time. (Well, it may be faster for other people, but I am new to this and quite slow in making things). As a result, I started making my dinner way before I started getting hungry, so I wouldn’t be starving all of a sudden and tempted to find a quick fix. This is fine for a Saturday, but I am not sure what I will do during the week when I get home from work and am already very hungry.

For dinner, I made this quinoa burger recipe which was given to me by my friend B. It was not difficult to make, thankfully, but did have a lot of steps so it took me a while. I was so happy that it ended up with the right consistency to make into patties. I was a bit worried I would mess it up. The recipe was for eight small patties, so that’s what I made. I wanted to just make fewer larger patties, but then I worried I would not know how long to cook them. I think next time it would be alright, though, to just make a few larger patties, because I did not go by the cooking time in the recipe, and just went by when the patties firmed up.

Along with three of the little patties, I had some more asparagus, some unsweetened applesauce, and some red potatoes.

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I had my dinner around 6:00 p.m. and was hungry again a few hours later. At least I think I was hungry. I may have just been feeling that emotional eating twinge on account of the Blackhawks getting badly beaten by the Canucks last night. I had a small handful of raisins and that seemed to do the trick.

This morning (Sunday) I had some steel cut oatmeal with applesauce mixed in and some bananas on top. I made a double serving because the last time I made it, one serving was not enough. Of course, two was too much and I could not finish it all. I had a sensation of not wanting to eat anymore, which I thought meant I was full, but now only half an hour later I feel like eating something else. I am not sure if it is hunger, though, or if I just feel like eating something.

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30 Whole Days Challenge

30_whole_days_challengePhoto courtesy of Happy Herbivore

In my quest to find healthy recipes that don’t include meat, eggs, or milk, I stumbled upon Happy Herbivore. I cannot remember exactly how I first found her site, but I am thankful that I have. She has a lot of great recipes on her website and has a cookbook coming out in January (which I already pre-ordered). My favorite is probably the fat-free raw vegan ice cream. You don’t even need an ice cream maker and it is delicious.

Recently she asked on Twitter whether any of her blog readers would be interested in doing a challenge wherein you eat only whole, non-processed foods for 30 days. The response was tremendous and the 30 Whole Days Challenge was born. You can check that link to get all the details (and sign-up yourself!), but essentially it involves eating only whole foods (fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, etc.) and no processed foods.

While some people may find this challenge to be easy, it is going to truly be a challenge for me. My eating habits in the past six months (eight months?) have been just awful. The amount of french fries that I have consumed is astronomical and although just about everything I cook and bake at home is vegan, I have eaten lots and lots of take-out pizza. My weight has increased, my energy is low, and I have no ambition to exercise. I hope that this challenge will help me to get back on track with being healthy.

If you are curious what kinds of things I will be eating, here is a list of suggested foods for the challenge. Although she lists things like tofu and corn tortillas as things to eat on a limited basis, I am going to cut myself some slack and let myself eat those kind of things. I do not want to set myself up for failure. As she has talked about on her blog, this should not be something that is so impossible to follow that you get discouraged and drop out. Even having tofu a few times a week is a thousand times better than the diet I am currently eating.

My main concern for being successful on this challenge is the weekends. We usually stop for fast food when we are out and about running errands. We usually get take-out for dinner Saturday night. I’m sure E will want to keep doing those things to some extent, so I will have to have strong willpower not to cave and get french fries. I intend to plan out meals and snacks this week so I am ready to go when the challenge starts on Saturday (May 1st). There is a new Whole Foods opening near me on May 5th, which will help in the shopping department. (Right now the closest one is about 20 minutes away).

I intend to blog here about my experience, my troubles, my happy recipe discoveries, etc. I will also likely be posting lots of pictures of my food on Twitter. If you know of any recipes made with whole foods that you think I’ll like, be sure to comment. I am especially looking for some yummy smoothie recipes and some good breakfast ideas. And if you want to join, check out Happy Herbivore.


#7: Take a road trip that involves at least one overnight stop.

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When I made this goal on my 101 in 1001 list, I was thinking about the trips that I took growing up. We would stay in hotels along the highway and stop off at places of interest along the way to our ultimate destination. It is a different kind of trip then just flying to your final destination and staying a few days there.

Last Wednesday night we headed out for a short road trip, with the ultimate destination being Nashville to see the Chicago Blackhawks play the Nashville Predators in the NHL playoffs. We decided to break the trip up into segments, so that we could see some fun things on the way and not spend 8+ hours in a row in the car. Here are the highlights:

Wednesday Night (after work)
Drove to Indianapolis. Stayed in a not so great hotel. Mostly just a stop-off point.

Thursday
Drove to Bowling Green, Kentucky. Visited the Corvette Museum and took a tour of the Bowling Green Assembly plant, which is the Corvette factory. The museum was fun, but the factory tour was awesome. Unfortunately they would not let us take pictures, so I cannot show you what it was like. (There was a guy in our tour group who took pictures and a security official came and took his camera and made him delete the photos).

The tour was about an hour and 15 minutes and showed us several different parts of the building process. We got to see one car, the ZR1, which starts at $106,000. It was a thing of beauty. They showed us how they “marry” the interior with the exterior, how they test drive the vehicle over a bumpy service, how they test it for water tightness (which gallons of water raining down on it), and lots more. I highly, highly, recommend the tour if you are passing through the area. It is in a separate part from the museum. If you have to pick between the museum and the tour, I would say take the tour.

Here are some pictures from the museum. You can see them all here: Corvette Museum Photos
1977 Corvette

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We then drove to Nashville and visited the Grand Ole Opry. We got to do a tour of that as well. It was pretty interesting, although the tour guide was too talkative about stuff that was not that interesting and the group was way too big. The best part was getting to go on the stage. The tour guide had us all sing a song so that we could say that we have sung on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry.

Here’s a photo I took while on the stage. You can see them all here: Grand Ole Opry Photos
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That night was the Blackhawks/Predators game, the whole reason for the trip. Before the game we were able to go right down to the glass to take pictures of the team during their pregame skate. It was awesome. I took a lot of pictures. I recorded the pre-game show on the DVR and watched it when we got home. You can see me up by the glass taking photos. Our seats for the game were spectacular. They were also extremely cheap in comparison to what it would cost to see a game in Chicago. There were other Blackhawks fans there, but probably not as many as when we went to games earlier this year in Columbus and St. Louis. The arena was very nice, mostly because it is a newer facility. The Hawks won 3-0, which was great and made the trip totally worth it.

Here are a few photos from the pre-skate. You can see them all here: Blackhawks photo
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At the end of the day, my pedometer said we walked 3.9 miles.

Friday
We headed out of Nashville and into Louisville, Kentucky. We had originally planned to stop off at Mammoth Cave on the way, but were pretty tuckered out, so decided to skip it. In Louisville, we went to the Louisville Slugger Museum and factory. I loved that place, especially the factory. I just wanted to hug all of the bats being made. Also, I love the smell of wood (is that weird?), so I was in heaven. My love for baseball is deep and long-standing, so this was almost like a mecca (not quite as great as Cooperstown, of course, but still wonderful). Unfortunately no pictures allowed in this factory either.

I didn’t take too many photos of the museum, but you can see them here: Louisville Slugger Museum.
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We enjoyed a nice lunch at Ramsi’s Cafe, which serves both vegan food and meat. That can be a rare find and we both loved our food. We rested at the hotel for a bit before heading to the Derby Days Great Balloon Glow. Our hotel was within walking distance, so that was a bonus because there were lots of people/cars there. (Although the estimation by the media of 50,000 people seemed to a gross overstatement in my opinion).

The weather was very windy when we first got there, so things were delayed. They said it was too dangerous to put the balloons up. Once it died down, the balloons lit up and we were able to walk around. While it was pretty, I was a bit disappointed with the fact that all the balloons had advertisements on them. I wasn’t expecting that. Also, the actual amount of time that we were able to go in and see the balloons was very short compared to the waiting around time. If I lived in the city, I don’t know if it would be worth it to drive there, deal with traffic, etc. However, since we were tourists and could walk there, I am glad we went.

You can see all the Balloon Glow pictures here.
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At the end of the day, my pedometer said we had walked 5.7 miles.

Saturday
We were up early and headed to Wild Eggs for breakfast. Their website said that they are the best breakfast in Louisville. It was quite yummy. We then headed to Cave Hill Cemetery to see the final resting place of Colonel Sanders. Unfortunately it was raining at that point, but I guess cemetery pictures aren’t supposed to be sunny anyway.

All my cemetery photos are here (there are only seven):
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I was proud of myself for figuring out how to get from our hotel, to breakfast, to the cemetery, while avoiding the Kentucky Derby Marathon. By the way, that course looks pretty fun. It goes through the Churchill Downs, all through downtown, to Louisville Slugger Field.

Then it was time to head home.


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