Nothing is better than leaving the house at 9 and having a day that is planned to see the most amazing people all the way through 5. Thank you all, you made my Friday. Today’s eats:

I introduced a newbie to the world of raw food today and I believe he fared well. We headed to Gro for our weekly noon meeting, caught up and had a wonderfully healthy meal. Gro is located on 437 Congress St., in between the Univeral Unitarian Church and the Public Library. You really need to check them out…how can you not love a cafe with a mission statement?! They have amazing smoothies, I recommend Gro Up, which has cacao, hemp seed, nut milk, honey, maca, goji berries, cayenne and chia. It provides a great little afternoon buzz. Today V and I both had the Terra Burger, which is their veggie burger. Keep in mind that this is a raw restaurant so nothing is heated about 112 degrees to preserve all of those precious enzymes, but it did seem dehydrated. It was so tasty! I had it on their homemade tomato flax wrap and V had it on Ezekiel bread, I thought that would be best for a newbie. Now for the bummer…I was so excited by my beautiful lunch and wonderful company that I totally forgot to take a picture. BOO! I know. So, you will have to be content with a picture of the menu. Maybe this will leave you in suspense and you get there faster.

Tonight for dinner it’s Potato Leek Soup. A fall staple and I’m home by myself, which is so nice after a busy week. No offense, S. I love pureed soups and this is one of the few, probably because it is made with potatoes (S will put any type of potato product in her mouth. I blame it on her Southern upbringing), pureed soups that S doesn’t complain about. The others feel too much like baby food for her. Mine was super straight forward, but in case you need a fall refresher, here it is:

Potato Leek Soup Vegan Style
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 large leek (I got a beautiful one from my CSA this week. Thanks Fresh Start Farms!)
2 C of yellow onion
1 garlic clove minced or more if you love garlic, for extra taste you could roast it
2 Large potatoes or a bunch of little ones, like I had from my CSA share, roughly 1 lb.
4 C of water or vegetable stock (I use vegan bouillion cubes)

Heat olive oil in a soup pot. Add onions and leek. Saute until onions are translucent. Add garlic, saute another min. Add potatoes, saute another min. or so. Add water/vegetable stock. Cook for 20 min. Let cool for a few minutes so you don’t totally burn yourself. Use an immersion blender (I wish!) or blender (like me) and blend until pureed. Set back on stove to simmer for a few min. and enjoy!

Now for dessert. I am so pumped..one of my favorite bloggers posted a very unique vegan ice cream recipe. Click here to find it. Did you look? I know, sounds scary, but I think it is going to turn out like pumpkin pie ice cream. I haven’t started up the ice cream maker, yet, but that is what it tastes like so far. I had to make a few substitutes: in stead of MimiCream, I used coconut milk. The trick for think vegan ice cream is putting your can of coconut in the fridge and the top will form a solid cream, but you should get the regular, not the light version. So, I used 3/4 C of the hard cream and 1 1/4 of the liquid; I used date syrup (4 dates processed with 1/2 C of water) for my sweetener, and instead of pumpkin pie spice I used cinnamin, nutmeg, ginger and a little all spice and just kept tasting until I got the spices right. I really wanted mine to be like pumpkin pie. I think it’s going to be amazing but I’ll let you know tomorrow!

Now, on to my pop culture for the night. Yep, you got it right Dan Brown and Butternut Ice Cream. Just heavenly! Have a great Friday all.

Categories: General

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.