travel Archives - Lovin' From the Oven

Rodelle Ambassador Trip

May 25, 2015 by kim Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Rodelle headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado with some other brand ambassadors. There was a small group of us, including:

Sarah from Snixy Kitchen
Nicole from Baking Bites
Aimee from Shugary Sweets
Peabody from Culinary Concoctions by Peabody
Lyuba from Will Cook for Smiles

We stayed at The Armstrong Hotel downtown. It was a quaint and comfortable in a wonderful location with updated amenities.We had about half an hour to settle in before we headed to Pateros Brewery.

We got to taste a flight of beer and had heavy hors d’oeuvres.

I’m not that much of a beer drinker, so I mostly sipped each drink.

After that, we got to go chocolate tasting at Nuance Chocolate.

This shop was dreamy as can be. Just take a look at that beautiful brick wall, original restored wood floors, and ceiling!

They’re one of the few shops that make chocolate directly from bean to bar. Everything is made in small batches and done locally.

We had a little presentation on how chocolate is made from the owner.

Here’s chocolate in all of its forms!

We tasted a flight of dark chocolate. The water crackers were to cleanse our palette after each taste.

My personal favorites were the Ghana and Venezuela. All of the chocolates here are made without any preservatives. The ingredients on a dark chocolate bar read “organic cacao, cane sugar.” That’s it. Just two simple ingredients.

We also got to taste a raspberry truffle. Oh. My. Goodness. This was by far the best truffle that I’ve ever had. It was also the most rich truffle I’ve ever had. I couldn’t even finish it.

I came home with a couple of bars to share with my DH. The coffee bean bar had no coffee flavor to us at all.

We walked back to our hotel and woke up bright and early the next day to visit Rodelle.

Here are just some of my favorite Rodelle products:

We had breakfast prepared for us there while we enjoyed a mini presentation on vanilla and cocoa.

Did you know that vanilla extract is the only extract regulated by the FDA? It must have a minimum of 35% alcohol per gallon of water. You also have to use 13.35 oz of vanilla beans to make one gallon of vanilla beans. You can add sugar to sweeten the extract, but Rodelle doesn’t use any additional sweeteners. It’s purely the good stuff.

Have you ever smelled a vanilla bean? Oh, that aroma is something I’d like in my house 24:7.

Later in the day, we also had a tour of the packing facilities. Cameras weren’t allowed so I don’t have anything to share from that (just be assured that it was very impressive!). We did, however, do a little vanilla tasting ourselves of vanillas from different regions of the world. It’s crazy how different each one tasted. We tried ones from Uganda, Madagascar, Mexico, and Pacific New Guinea.

One of the most exciting things that we learned about during our trip was a new product called Rodelle Reserve. It’s a French Oak Aged Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Extract made from vanilla beans that are extracted in double strength small batches and aged in French Oak Barrels for months.

It is one beautiful bottle and I can’t wait to use it in the kitchen! Look… I even got “Batch No. 1!”

Last but not least, we left on full stomachs, thanks to the Rodelle Kitchen.

Thank you so much to the Rodelle team for hosting us with such hospitality. I had a wonderful time and must visit again soon!

You can also buy Rodelle items online:

A California Avocado Weekend

May 1, 2015 by kim Leave a Comment

This past weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity of touring, tasting, and learning all about California avocados, thanks to the California Avocado Commission. I have so many pictures to share with you from this trip! Let’s talk about California Avocados, shall we?

They’re hand grown in California by nearly 5,000 growers and supply about 90% of the entire U.S.’ avocado crop.
There are 7 different kinds of avocados grown in California, with the most popular one being the Hass. The Hass makes up about 95% of the crop volume.
Avocados have less than 1 gram of sugar, contain no sodium, have 11 beneficial carotenoids, supply 152 mg of potassium, and are full of the “good” fats. In other words, they’re great for you to eat!
They’re also a nutrient booster since it helps the body absorb more fat-soluble nutrients.

I’ll share some more avocado tidbits throughout this post. When I first came for the weekend trip, I was greeted with this adorable swag bag:

Timeout. Can we talk about that California shaped cutting board?! If this was the only thing that I got from the weekend, I’d walk away happy as a clam.

But nope, there’s more… we got to stay at the Four Seasons in Westlake Village, California! Ummm, what? I had to read the email twice when I first got the itinerary. Truly a treat (especially since I’m a Four Seasons virgin).I got a little too excited and even did a robe and slippers selfie. Sorry, not sorry.

We had dinner planned for us at Salt in Calabasas with a menu specifically made for us. All of our menus for those two days were made special for our group. Avocados galore in every dish!

Our 1st course was a California Avocado and ruby grapefruit with baby kale and citrus vinaigrette.2nd course: Kalua pork and California Avocado egg rolls3rd Course: Dungeness crab, mango, and California Avocado

4th course: Braised short ribs with California Avocado smashed potatoes5th course: Chocolate cake with California Avocado and chocolate anglaise My favorite dish from the meal was probably the salad. All of the avocados that we ate were perfectly ripe and creamy. When you’re looking for a delicious avocado, make sure to look for the “California label” for premium quality. To tell if it’s ripe, gently squeeze the fruit in the palm of your hand. Don’t use your fingers or push too hard! That’ll cause bruising.

We had breakfast at the hotel the next morning.

Top left: smoked salmon and egg salad with diced avocado on pumpernickel toast triangles
Top right: chilled avocado, mango, honey and greek yogurt smoothie shooters
Bottom left: avocado, agave and yogurt parfaits with house made granola
Bottom Right: I didn’t get the name of this dish, but it’s basically a bacon bruschetta.

You better believe there were avocados in every dish!

Our first stop of the day was to Brokaw Nursery in Ventura to see how avocados were grown. Hank Brokaw spent twenty years figuring out how to effectively graft trees with good rootstock and desired fruit varieties. Because of him, his method soared throughout California. His nursery is now the state’s largest avocado tree producer and has sold more than 10 million trees! Here are the stages of an avocado tree, starting out as a (rather large) seed.Approximately 10% of the trees die at each stage, so they have to order 50% more seeds than wanted trees to ensure that the right number of trees survive. These seeds come from Florida and the Dominican Republic, and they’re West Indian seeds.

Something unique about Brokaw Nursery is this copper dip/bath that everyone and everything goes through before entering the nursery.

We had to do it too! It prevents diseases being dragged into the dirt/soil. This is what avocados look like when they begin sprouting. Little itty bitty babies!

The trees are at the nursery for 1 1/2 – 2 years before they sell them. They’re at their prime at around nine years old and can live up to thirty years.

For our next stop of the day, we went to Rancho Rodoro in Santa Paula. These were our fabulous hosts: Randy Axell and his wife, Joanna.They’re pretty much the cutest two peas in a pod that I ever did see. Randy is one of the growers for California Avocados and welcomed us onto his 40 acres of land, where we got to pick our own avocados!

I had no idea this many avocados could grow on one branch! The branch gets so heavy that it almost touches the floor at times. Those are the ones that were the easiest to pick. Not only did Randy let us pick his avocados, he also welcomed our group for lunch in his barn.

Stop it. How cute can this little family be? The barn was filled with antiques and memorabilia.

I never drink anything besides water or hot tea, but I gulped down three cups of that strawberry rhubarb lemonade. My mouth is salivating as I type. Our lunch was prepared by Chef Pink, who owns Bacon and Brine in Solvang. You might recognize her from Cutthroat Kitchen and The Food Network.

We began with appetizers. There was avocado gazpacho.

This was my favorite. It was simply bread, avocados, and a Korean spicy salt mixture.Mini bacon/avocado sandwiches. This bacon absolutely rocked my world. No wonder why her restaurant has “bacon” in the name! Chef Pink sure knows how to cook it. We followed up appetizers with the main meal: a Kimchi pork and avocado burger with an avocado arugula salad.

As if we didn’t eat enough, dessert was a key lime and California Avocado tart. It was light, vegan (if you take off the whipped cream on top), and tangy.We walked off our meal after lunch and got to see Randy’s house that was recently restored. Him and his wife live on the farm, so they literally live and breathe avocados. It shows how much passion Randy has for the farm life. As he states, “I love being able to spend every day on our farm and in the groves. It’s very satisfying to be able to grow something from a tiny seed to a full tree. [Being a California avocado grower is] so much like heaven and it takes care of me and my family.”For the last part of the tour, we went to Mission Avocados to see how avocados were packed. This is one of California’s newest packing houses. We didn’t get to take pictures throughout the tour, but I was able to take an aerial shot.

SO many avocados just waiting to be delivered into people’s homes!

Here are some of the different sized avocados. There are still avocados bigger and smaller than the ones pictured.

We went back to the hotel to rest for a bit before dinner at the hotel. Chef Jesse Hansen prepared the menu for us. Side note… I just saw that he was born in Albany, CA. That was where we were living before we came back down to LA! What a small world! I sure do love that little town just north of Berkeley.

What’s dinner without some appetizers?There were mini ahi tuna tacos, chicken empanadas, and tempura avocados.

We had a mini avocado session, where we learned how to select an avocado, how to ripen an avocado, and how to cut an avocado. We also learned how simple avocado toast was. Remember my favorite avocado toast? I still make it quite frequently.We sat down for dinner in the private dining room.

Our table set up was so elegant!

For dinner, we had a bitter greens salad with avocado carpaccio and Shelton Farms semi-boneless half chicken with english pea and new potato hash, seared trumpet mushrooms with a California Avocado roasted pepper salsa. For dessert, we had dark chocolate whiskey cake with California Avocado ice cream and a blood orange sauce. My favorite part was by far the avocado ice cream. It was perfect.

To sum up the weekend: I probably ate about ten avocados, saw the entire process of avocados from the dirt to our plates, and loved every second of it. Thank you so much to the California Avocado Commission for including me in such a special event! For more recipes and tips, check them out on:

Stay tuned. I have lots of California Avocado recipes coming up!

Travel: London

October 3, 2014 by kim 6 Comments

I have SO much catching up to do on my blog. Seriously. I went to London at the end of March (thanks to the contest last year from Colman’s Mustard) and never even posted about that! I’m going to update you on everything that we did during those four days. Everything.

First of all, the most important part of traveling is being prepared for the flight. We had plenty of snacks, my iPod nano, good headsets, my Kindle, and a useful tour book. We used this one from Knopf and it was perfect for us. There were plenty of maps, the price was right, and it was small enough to carry around without a problem. It gave us the bullet points of London without all of the fluff.

They put us at the Bailey’s Hotel in Kensington, which was prime for the location. We were right across the street from the Tube and had plenty of restaurants and stores within walking distance.

We landed late in the afternoon, so there wasn’t much time for traveling too far.

All of the streets tell you where to look for cars before crossing the street.

Turns out the Natural History Museum was only a couple of blocks away from our hotel. That makes it our first stop in London!

After that, we headed over to Harrods. It’s basically a huge upper scale shopping store that is divided into sections– chocolate and tea, pastries and dessert, savory foods, designer handbags, perfume… It’s a big deal.

It’s like Disneyland!

We picked up a palmier and chocolate danish before we headed over to eat at Caffe Concerto. It’s a chain, but we just walked into the first restaurant we saw because we were starving.

I got the the grilled chicken pesto on a baguette and my DH got a ham and cheese sandwich with an espresso. Simple enough, nothing fancy.

We went to the M+S grocery store that night to pick up a few snacks/drinks for the hotel.

For the second day, we started off by seeing Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and the Royal Guard Horses.

After our feet got tired, we found our way over to The White Swan.

Latte and a London Pride cask conditioned ale.

I had a croque monsieur.

The DH had Bangers and Mash.

Next on our agenda: St. Paul’s Cathedral, Queen’s Walk, the Shakespeare Globe, Tate Modern, Borough Market, and the Covent Garden Area.

Borough Market was amazing. It had every kind of food you could imagine, fresh and tasty.

We got some juice and coffee.

We saved our stomachs for dinner at Tokyo Diner.

Chicken katsu curry and salmon donburi were on the menu for us. This meal was as good as eating in Japan.

We strolled over to Chinatown at night, where gypsies pretty much took over the streets. We picked up our kind of nightcap: boba.

Matcha green milk tea with red bean and taro milk tea with pudding.

Now we’re on Day 3. First thing’s first… food!

I had the “half and half”– granola, yogurt, fruit.

DH had the chorizo hash with an Americano.

We then walked over to the British Museum and Notting Hill, where they have the famous Portobello Road/Market.

Red velvet cupcake from Hummingbird Bakery, which was not impressive at all. The cake was dry and the frosting was hard. I’ll pass.

Another fail was our chocolate waffle from Wafflemeister. Stale, overly sweet, and cold.

We made up for all of the bad food by visiting Dishoom. It was a restaurant recommended to us by a friend and when we tried to go the first time, the wait was over two hours. What restaurant is two floors and has a two hour wait at 8:30PM on a Tuesday night? That’s insane! We skipped that night, but came back again the next day at an odd hour to make sure we’d get a table.

We ordered the house chai, Dishoom chicken tikka, black daal, and garlic naan.

Ahhhh, now we understand the hype. This is the BEST Indian food we’ve ever had! Everything exceeded our expectations and we licked our plates clean.

Time to walk it off at the Tower of London/Tower Bridge!

We were craving a little something warm after walking around all day and went into the most crowded Vietnamese place we saw. This place was busy!

I got bun bo hue and my DH had pho. It’s hard to mess up Vietnamese food. We met one of my friends later at a lounge/bar called Jaguarshoes and called it a night.

For our last full day in London, we started it off by going to V&A museum. I read online that they had the best scones in their cafe and had to go see for myself.

Their cafe is breathtaking.

…. and it was the best scone I’ve ever had. We ordered a raisin scone, mocha, ham and cheese croissant, and a cappuccino. I have no idea how they make their scones, but you need to try them if you go to London.

Since it was such a nice day, we walked through Hyde Park and enjoyed being outdoors for a bit.

We went to Putney, where the River Thames run through in order to watch some rowing. It’s something else. I was mesmerized watching the boats float effortlessly across the water.

We headed to Duke’s Head for lunch, where I pretty much drank all of my DH’s Aspall Saffolk Cider.

We had fish and chips and a burger. The fish and chips were spot on.

We winded down our day by going to the Churchill War Rooms and walking around the London Eye.

For our last meal, we didn’t want to venture out too far again after returning to our hotel so late. We ate at Nando’s, a chain restaurant that thoroughly satisfied our stomachs.

To sum it all up, what did I learn about London?

Well, the food isn’t as bad as everyone says it is. In fact, we had some of the best food we’ve ever eaten (the scone at V&A museum and Dishoom). You just have to know where to go.
Getting around is extremely easy with the Tube, but it’s crazy at rush hour. We avoided traveling during that time.
Westminster Abbey is a MUST.
Toilet water pressure is low. We actually had to google how to flush the toilet in our hotel room.
The air quality is terrible. My snot mucous was black (sorry TMI).
Yogurt is sub par, but the tea is awesome.
Their parks are their beaches.
There aren’t very many homeless people.
You need to make a dinner reservation every night you eat out otherwise you can’t get a table.
There are no toilet seat covers or privacy blockers for urinals (found that out thanks to my DH).
Words used that we don’t: cheers (salutation or thank you), toilet (restroom), cycle (bike), lift (elevator).

Coming up next… Australia and New Zealand!

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