Wow, I can not believe how much fun we had in Las Vegas for our Thermomix reward, trip, I did not expect to visit Vegas but if I did get to go I had 2 things on the list to do see the Grand Canyon & see the Cirque du Soleil show O & both of these activities just happened to be included in this amazing trip. We were lucky enough to stay at The Cosmopolitan right next to the famous Bellagio, with magnificent views of the Bellagio fountain. After exploring some of the other hotels I’m sure we stayed at the best one on the strip! Yes it is a long trip over but it was worth it, it was so fantastic to meet up again with fellow Thermomix consultants we met at the Paris reward trip last year & others we have met at previous Thermofest trips. This time there were about 80 of us all together including group leaders & admin staff.
At check in room, we were provided some nibbles & cool drinks. Then up to our amazing room on level 52! What a view & the fountain put on a display straight away, I had a quick look around outside & around the facilities before getting ready for our first event, a cocktail party, complete with a welcome green Thermomix themed cocktail, there were lots of drinks but not too much food just some small bites. A few people went out for dinner & some went to try their luck at winning some money in Vegas.
The famous night club Marquee opened at 10.30pm we had free entry because we were staying at The Cosmopolitan, only a couple of us went up & had a bit of a dance & a looksie, it was very busy & we later found out that in the off season it is only open Friday – Monday night. You could buy a glass of wine for $12 or a bottle of wine for $395, when we asked about this apparently the bottle secured you a poolside table & table service as well.Completely jet lagged we got into bed very late or should I say early on Tues morning.
The buffet breakfast at the wicked spoon provides so many options it was so hard to choose – even sorbet for breakfast! There was an omelette station, with anything & everything you could imagine, then in a room just off the restaurant, we had our first training session on social media with Scott Cramer from Multi Brain. Then it was so exciting to have a chat with Executive Chef at The Cosmopolitan Matt Crane & even better he gave a tour of The Cosmopolitan restaurants & behind the scenes in the kitchens, including the pastry area with Executive Pastry Chef Vincent Pilon. (Check out his awesome instagram account here.)
After lunch at the wicked spoon we had a little bit of free time before meeting our transfer to the helicopters.
A flight for 13 helicopters into the Grand Canyon, we were all so excited & I loved that they had music playing in our headsets. (It stopped when someone wanted to talk though)
I had tears of joy streaming down my face as we entered the Canyon.
This is one of the first recipes I added to the Thermomix recipe community around 6.5 years ago & it has been extremely popular – of course you can add chicken to it if you prefer, it’s great to grow my own lime leaves too. You can store lime leaves, chillies & coriander roots in the freezer, so you have most of the ingredients ready to go for an easy week night dinner packed full of flavour. It’s delicious served with my coconut rice recipe too – if you are making the coconut rice recipe in the Model 5 you need to add more liquid either coconut cream or water to take it up to the 1200g marker & it’s a bonus you can steam more veggies on top of the rice while it’s steaming! Or if you really want to pack in more veggies why not serve it with my roasted cauliflower “rice” recipe. For more great vegetarian recipe ideas click here.
Cheese is one of my favourite ingredients & so I have wanted to make this recipe from current top chef in the world Massimo Bottura from his restaurant Osteria Francescana. I loved watching the Netflix series Chef’s Table & the episode with Massimo was great. (Watch it here) And another reason to get excited for me is that I will get to eat a dish prepared by Massimo himself when I am in New York in early October – the foodie stars have aligned & I am booked into a progressive dinner cooked by 6 top chef’s including Massimo Bottura!! Yes I am extremely excited I wonder which dish he will be making it may even be this one? This is a recipe from Dani Valent’s cookbook In the Mix 2 cookbook it has been adapted for the home cook. Normally featuring not only 5 textures of parmasean but 5 ages of parmesan. I decided to use 5 different types of parmesan instead, making the best I could with what I could get & I was very happy with the results 🙂 Apart from my domestic cream siphon not working very well that is!
I even made homemade ricotta for one of the elements to the dish – see my cheese making post here.
One of the elements even called for making a parmasean stock out of the rind of the parmasean 🙂
This is a Ben Shewry recipe from Dani Valent Cooking, Elaine was Ben’s Grandma – what a delicious fun cake to make & photograph 🙂 YUM!! thermomix ganache is so easy & amazing!!
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