Liver, living, lived

Well, I used the last of my Tabasco sauce last night (liver and bacon casserole, since you ask. When did you last eat lamb’s liver? Thought so. Explains your iron deficit). I have no idea when I bought that bottle - only 60mls, too, which tells you a lot about how exotic a cook I am not (as if the mere mention of liver hadn’t established that immediately). The expiry date though was 2020 and, since Tabasco has only three ingredients, two of them highly preservative, I’m guessing it was, let’s say, heritage.

I didn’t have to check about the ingredients. When you go - as I did in 2016 - to Avery Island, down on the Louisiana coast a 40-minute nail-biting wrong-side drive from Lafayette, and visit the factory, they drum that in right from the start. Red chilli peppers, salt, vinegar, time. That’s it.  My sort of recipe, actually - which is kind of ironic, since the Tabasco motto is 'Defending the world against bland food'.

It was a very pleasant place to wander, read the history, watch the bottles being filled, browse the shop (where I didn't buy any sauce, since I had that bottle in the pantry already and knew it still had years of use in it). Then there were jungly gardens with herons but no alligators, a gorgeous heritage plantation house, a creepy rice mill, and then a triumphantly accident-free drive back to Lafayette. 

Lunch, nice cool museum with a freshly-moulted golden knee spider, another wander around Lafayette's pleasing streets, and then to the railway station for a long wait with Rosa Parks for the inevitably behind-time Amtrak to New Orleans where I eventually arrived at 10.30pm, ahead of the huge annual IPW tourism conference that was my main focus for the trip.

It was a long day, but full of colour, interest and novelty. The drive aside, I enjoyed myself the whole time. It feels like another world, now, doing that sort of thing. Buying a fresh bottle of Tabasco at Countdown really isn't going to be any sort of compensation for not travelling any more. It is, though, a reminder to crack open the Creole seasoning I bought in Lafayette. The Best Before for that one is 2018...