Today I had the awesome (rawsome) experience of going to a raw foods restaurant in Tampa called The Leafy Greens. (Oh, did I mention? I’m in Florida!)
I ordered “The Real Deal” which is a sandwich of raw cashew hummus, letttuce, grape tomatoes, and guac served on raw onion bread. Fabulous! Doug ordered the Zucchini Spaghetti – also very good with sun-dried tomatoes and a fresh tomato sauce. Doug’s mom got the “Not Tuna” sandwich, which I didn’t think really tasted like tuna but was good nonetheless, and Doug’s brother got the Mediterranean Pizza – hemp seed and walnut crust with cashew hummus, fennel, olives, cucumber, and tomatoes YUM. A really cool thing about this place was that you could get half orders of everything. So if you really wanted the Zucchini Spaghetti but The Real Deal was calling you too, you could half orders of each. It was totally rawsome (!) to find a raw foods restaurant here since I’ve only seen them in LA and NYC.
Of course we had to get dessert! I got the Carrot Cake
Isn’t it gorgeous? There’s no flour in it (it’s raw!) so it was very dense. Just carrot pulp (ah ha! something to do with leftover carrot pulp after juicing!), walnuts, dates, apricots, and raisins. It was not very sweet at all - actually I think I would have liked a teeny bit more sweetness.
Doug’s mom got the Mango Cobbler, which I think was the best of all of them.
It was like a fresh mango pudding with crunchy pieces of walnut and dates. Sweet and light. Heaven!
And Doug’s dad got the Apricot Pie
It was so good that I couldn’t get a picture taken before it was practically gone! This was my second favorite after the mango pudding.
Doug and his brother both got the chocolate peanut butter raw Soft Serve ice cream made with a banana base. It was so delicious it inspired us to make our own raw vegan ice cream!
So for our dessert tonight we had:
Raw (sort of) Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup peanut butter (ours wasn’t raw but you could use raw peanut butter or other raw nut butter)
- 2 cans of coconut milk
- 1 cup agave nectar
- 1/2 cup Dutch processed cocoa powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
Directions
- Line a small cookie sheet with parchment paper.
- Take 1/2 teaspoons of peanut butter and roll into little balls (ok, more like globs). Place the globs on the cookie sheet and put in the freezer.
- Combine the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and mix until well combined.
- Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker and process for about 30 minutes.
- When there is about 5 minutes left to go, add in the frozen globs of peanut butter.
- You could eat the ice cream right out of the ice cream maker but it will be soft like soft serve. We scooped ours into individual serving cups and put the cups in the freezer while we prepared and ate dinner. When we got the ice cream out for dessert, it was still pretty soft but it was awesome anyway. I’m sure if you leave it in the freezer longer it will become more like traditional ice cream.
The ice cream was delicious. I think I would maybe put in more peanut butter next time but really it was pretty fabulous as it was.
SOOOOOOOO….now we want to make another batch tomorrow night! Hey we’re on vacation! Some ideas we’ve talked about:
- Changing the base of the ice cream to soy milk + creamer, cashews, almond milk, or hemp milk
- Adding in avocado to increase the creaminess
- Flavor ideas: mint, cinnamon, chai, peanut butter, vanilla
- Sorbet? Gelato?
Any ideas out there on a fabulous vegan ice cream we can make tomorrow?