Travelling Gourmet Food Truck in Orlando, FL

Travelling Gourmet is one of the newest food trucks to start serving in Orlando. They sell organic & local foods, all out of their trailer. They were at the Orlando Food Truck Bazaar #2 and I decided to give them a try.

I had the Pork Lettuce Wraps, served with a side of plantain chips. The pork came locally from Palmetto Creek Farms and the greens came from Heart of Christmas Farms. The lettuce wraps were topped with corn, black beans, and feta, resulting in a very tasty flavor combination.


I'm not sure if Travelling Gourmet is serving anywhere on a normal basis around town or if they just come out to events like the Food Truck Bazaar. Either way, I'd give them another try if I spot them around town.

Aloha Friday Farmers' Market Dinner in Orlando, FL

I received a media invitation to the Aloha Friday Farmers' Market Dinner hosted by Slow Food Orlando at Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Studios Orlando and went to check out the event.

Before taking a look at the food, here's a bit of background about Slow Food Orlando:
Slow Food envisions a future food system that is based on the principles of high quality and taste, environmental sustainability, and social justice. We are working for food that is Good, Clean and Fair. We work with producers and co-producers: farmers, chefs, citizens, educators and other activists to ensure that the food shed of Orlando and beyond is safe, healthy and delicious! Please visit www.slowfoodorlando.org for more information.

 Music was provided by Volcano Joe and the Hot Lava Band.

 Orlando Brewing and 4 Orange Vodka served alcoholic beverages for the event.

 Starting off the food for the evening, I had a salad from the 'Create your own salad station' provided by Hearts of Christmas Farms. It was set up like a typical salad bar until the salad bowl was handed to an attendant who tossed the salad with dressing.

 My salad consisted of a nice variety of lettuces, cucumbers, carrots, red onion, sun-dried cherries, sunflower seeds, parmesan cheese, and was tossed with ginger soy dressing. The ginger soy dressing was really tasty!

 The bread that accompanied the salad came from Olde Hearth Bread Company in Casselberry. Olde Hearth definitely has some of the best bread in the area, including this swirly, two foot long bread stick.

Deep Creek Ranch Livestock served All Natural Roast Beef Sandwiches. These sandwiches consisted of Italian style roast beef with fresh mozzarella, giardiniera, and sweet peppers on semolina bread.

Emeril's Tchoup Chop was also serving food at the event. I'm not entirely sure if Tchoup Chop was serving local food, or if they were just there since the restaurant shares the Royal Pacific Hotel. Tchoup Chop provided two different sushi rolls. Each plate had a spicy tuna roll and a salmon roll with cream cheese and vegetables which were topped with a spicy sauce.

Palmetto Creek Farms from Avon Park set up a Pork Taco Station. These freshly made corn tacos were filled with roast pork carnitas, shredded lettuce, guacamole, tomato salsa, and chipotle sour cream.

Wild Ocean Seafood Market had this wonderful display of fresh fish set up, but more importantly, they were also serving Port Canaveral Shrimp Dumplings.

These Ruby Red Shrimp Dumplings were served with bean sprouts, cilantro, and basil, all in a red curry broth. Out of the evening's food choices, these dumplings were my overall favorite!

Finally, after all of that food, there was still dessert! From what I could gather, the dessert was made by the Royal Pacific Hotel itself.

The Blueberry Upside down Cake consisted of layers of cake and blueberry, with chocolate at the bottom and topped with whipped cream and chocolate.

I really liked the Florida Peach Cobbler, with it's peach filling and edible printed decorations on top.

Fresh ice cream was also being made using huge canisters of nitrogen. I've never seen a setup like this before, but it was really interesting to watch. Fog from the super-cold nitrogen surrounded the ice cream mixer until it was ready. They had both caramel and mango flavors. Both were very tasty...

I definitely enjoyed the Aloha Friday Farmer's Market Dinner! It was humongous amount of food, all of which was really good. Even better, the majority (if not all) of the food came from local sources and everything seemed to be really good quality. I need to check out more of Slow Food Orlando's events in the future!

Animal Kingdom's Yak & Yeti Local Foods Cafes

Continuing my day at Disney's Animal Kingdom, I had lunch at the Yak & Yeti Local Foods Cafes. This is a fast food attachment to the full service Yak & Yeti restaurant with outdoor seating.

I was considering eating at the actual full service Yak & Yeti, but after looking at their menu, I changed my mind. It seemed they had pretty standard dishes that you could get at any Chinese Restaurant, but charged about $30 per dish. The Local Foods Cafes also featured some pretty standard Chinese dishes, along with some burgers, all for much less money. If I wanted to spend top dollar on Chinese food, I don't think a Landry restaurant in a theme park is the best choice.

I ordered the Shrimp Lo Mein. It had plenty of shrimp served over noodles with a somewhat limited selection of vegetables. It definitely could have used more variety when it came to the vegetables in the dish, but it was still pretty tasty. It was a whole lot of food too. Much more than what it looked like.

I also split an order of Pork Egg Rolls. This had to be one of the greasiest egg rolls I've ever eaten. The hot oil was dripping off of the roll when I picked it up! I don't know what happened here, but it wasn't a good thing!

Moving away from the food/restaurant pictures for the rest of this post, I'll say a few things about the new stuff in Animal Kingdom to please the obsessive Disney fans who cause a big spike in this blog's traffic whenever something Disney related is posted.

First new thing was the whole carnival themed area that was added to Dinoland. I didn't quite understand the purpose of the whole area, except as a cheap theme to tie in some carnival rides. What do dinosaurs have to do with carnivals or roadside attractions? I went on the Primeval Whirl roller coaster while in this section of the park. Kind of a stupid ride, but it is what it is. I love roller coasters, but wild mouse coasters really do nothing for me.


Moving on to Dinosaur. Last time I rode this, I'm pretty sure it was called Countdown to Extinction. Very cool ride, but stupid storyline. As someone who has spent way too much time in Natural History museums, the Carnotaurus on this ride really bothers me. This ride portrays the carnotaurus as a large animal, equivalent to a tyrannosaur, when in reality they were much smaller dinosaurs. Even smaller than the iguadon that you are trying to rescue in the ride. I would have expected better scientific accuracy from a ride partly narrated by Bill Nye the Science Guy...


Last, I have to mention Expedition Everest. This ride was one of the highlights of the day. As far a themed roller coasters go, this is definitely one of the best, right up there with Thunder Mountain. Roller coasters always seem so much better when they build a fake mountain around the track. It had it's nice surprises and was really smooth. Only disappointment was that the robotic yeti wasn't working. Still, Expedition Everest is a really fun ride!