Celestial Seasonings Tour

Boulder Colorado is home to the Celestial Seasonings tea company. They make more than just tea, but tea is their main focus. Actually, herbal tea is their specialty. So I dragged Mr X with me up to the factory in Boulder to take the free tour. I love free. Before the tour starts you have to watch a short film about the company and then at the end they go through safety tips - the usual, no running or sliding (apparently the floors in the factory get covered in tea dust which makes them perfect for slipping and sliding). They also require the use of hair-nets and beard-nets from everybody entering the factory. For the first time in my life I was bummed Mr X didn't have a beard because the men in our tour that did have facial hair looked positively silly in both hair and beard -nets. Upon entering the factory I immediately noticed the incredibly strong smell of, well, herbs and flowers in the air. It smelled fantastic, though I imagine that people with allergies would HATE the tea factory. We were shown where in the world the ingredients come from (my favorite part of the tour) and then how they arrive, how they are cleaned, sifted and chopped. And then we saw how they were packaged. We were also taken to the peppermint room (my second favorite part of the tour). The peppermint has to be kept separate from all of the other tea ingredients because the smell and taste is so strong that it contaminates everything with which it comes in contact with. Our tour guide explained that they originally had kept the peppermint room right next to the other rooms but the next thing they knew, all of their tea flavors had a decidedly minty taste to them. So now they keep the peppermint in a double-walled room with empty rooms next two it because even double-walled the flavor oozes out. We were allowed to enter the peppermint room and it actually almost hurts to breath in there. It clears out your sinuses and makes your eyes water. Oh and for the rest of the day you smell like mint. I liked that part.

After the tour was over, Mr X and I went to the sampling room to sample all sorts of interesting teas. Then we perused the gifts shop breifly before we were on our way. It was an interesting tour and I enjoyed it, though it's definitely not something I'd want to do twice.

(Note: Celestial Seasonings didn't allow us to take photos of the factory so I didn't bother to bring my camera. These photos were swiped from the Celestial Seasonings website.)

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen...

This past weekend I finally decided to conquer one of my fears in the kitchen: Croissants. They've always seemed to daunting to me because they are so time consuming and so seemingly complicated because of that butter disk you have to incorporate just so. For those of you who don't know, this is the short story on how to make croissants: You have to make the dough and let it sit in the for nearly three days (two nights at least). At first it rests on the counter for a few hours, then in the fridge over night, then you alternate putting it back in the fridge with thirty minute stints in the freezer. You also have to make a butter block - which is basically taking cold butter and hammering it into a more pliable form and then shaping it into a fairly large, thin rectangle. Then you stick that back in the fridge to firm up again. Then you wrap it in the rolled out dough. Again and again and again until your dough has 27 alternating layers of dough/butter. Then you finally cut out your triangles and roll them up and then let them proof on the counter for about 3 hours before baking them. And that's the ONLY way to get those flaky buttery layers that make a croissant so fantastic. This whole process has, for a long time, intrigued me and intimidated me. But I finally decided to just get over it and I was delighted with the results: See? I got my butter flaky layers! I couldn't have been more thrilled. It worked. These croissants were absolutely delicious. I nearly ate all of them. I should never make them again. But I most certainly will. In order to balance out the mass consumption of croissants, I made a simple salad for dinner. I tossed salad greens in a pomegranate champagne vinaigrette that I made and then I topped the greens with goat cheese, prosciutto, plums and mint. I think it's one of my all time favorite salads.

Roxborough State Park

Last Saturday, the day after we had a snowstorm and went to Vail, it was 70 degrees outside. So Mr X and I journeyed to another state park to go exploring. There are few places here that have loads of 'hogback' rock formations. This was another one of them. We took one of the longer hiking trails available - 6 miles round trip, I believe - that goes from the base up to the top of the ridge. The trail starts out quite flat and it's closed in by these scraggly oak trees on either side. It lends a sense of creepiness to the trail but I imagine that in the summer and/or fall it would be quite beautiful to see.
However, the trail quickly start increasing in altitude enough so that we felt a bit like we were climbing stairs most of the way up. The views were spectacular.

(If you look closely at the photo below you can just make out the faint outline of downtown Denver.)

(Once we got to the top of the ridge, if we looked to the east we saw what is captured in the photo above. If we turned and looked west we saw the view captured below. It's quite a stark difference in landscape.)

Snowboarding at Vail

Last Thursday night while Mr X and I were sound asleep there was a snowstorm going on outside. When we woke up bright and early Friday morning (incidentally I had the day off) we looked outside to a delightful four inches of fresh snow. So we checked the ski reports and discovered that Vail had gotten 9 inches of fresh powder. So onto the car went our gear and off we went to the mountains to play for the day.

I had this idea in my head that Vail was going to be the best place to snowboard of any that I'd tried so far this year. I was very disappointed. I thought the mountain/lifts where laid out poorly, making getting around to the different parts of the mountain a bit cumbersome. Since it was difficult to get to the various peaks via lifts, we had to take the lifts all the way back up and go on these long windy cat-tracks any time we wanted to get to a different part of the mountain. Cat-tracks are not particularly fun and when they are super long they get really boring - especially if you have to keep taking them. My other problem with Vail is that the runs themselves seem to be either difficult or easy. They didn't have a good mix of all different degrees of difficulty. And my final problem with Vail was the crowd - they were rude, they had an attitude of entitlement and there were way too many of them. Oh - another minus is how incredibly commercialized the village area of the resort is - I didn't like it. I would say Vail is my least favorite ski resort in Colorado so far. (Of course Mr X and I still had a fun day. It was our day off and we were snowboarding even if it wasn't the best resort.)

The good news, however, is that Mr X and I remembered our camera and so we were finally able to take some pictures for you. But as always, the pictures never quite seem to do the landscape justice.

(This is at the top of one of the peaks at Vail - a couple lifts converge at this point.)

Local News

You may have already heard on the news that there is a fire burning here in Colorado. It's uncomfortably close to where Mr X and I live. We can see the smoke billowing from our neighborhood and if we drive down towards town this is what we see:

We had to run some errands yesterday and on our way home we stopped and I snapped some pictures with my phone. Unfortunately for the firefighters it's been super windy here the past couple of days. Today we are expecting strong wind again as well. But last night it snowed about an inch so maybe that helped.

Elk Meadow Park

Last week, one early evening, Mr X and I decided to go for a leisurely walk at one of our favorite places to meander - Elk Meadow Park. As the name suggests, it's usually brimming with elk, much to our delight.

(Now I realize that anybody who is reading my blog is going to start getting sick of the seemingly endless photos of nature Mr X and I have been snapping recently. Sorry, I just can't help myself. It's gorgeous here, what can I say? Mr X says I should intersperse my 'nature' posts with interesting food posts but to be honest - I'm a miserable chef here in the Rocky Mountains because I really haven't figured out the quirks of high altitude cooking yet. So until I figure that out I'll be cooking less, walking more and subsequently snapping photos of nature more. But really, aren't these pictures better than photos of weird food anyway? I think so.)

Anyway, back to the story. So we walked around the trails for a couple of hours chatting and happily snapping pictures. Here's a sampling of the results:

I have no clue what type of bird this is. If anybody knows, please enlighten me as I'm very curious. It was so incredibly bright against the backdrop of the gold grass (that sounds better than 'dead grass' doesn't it?).

Spectacular Views

When I fly back and forth from CA to CO for work, this is the view from the window seat as we cross the Rocky Mountains. It's so mesmerizing. I don't think I'll ever get sick of it.


Mr X and I keep trying to remember to bring our camera with us when we go snowboarding because the views from the tops of the various ski resorts are truly heavenly and I'd like to try to capture it for your enjoyment. Unfortunately we keep forgetting our camera. I'll try to remember it next time. In the meantime, the photo below will have to suffice.