Nifty Holiday Gift Ideas for Raw Foodies and Green Fans

Have you seen the list of nifty and inexpensive gift ideas at Raw Foods News Magazine?

The list features hard-to-find raw holiday cards, really pure cosmetics; fab food items and ingredients; inspiring DVDs and books; and gorgeous green arts and crafts.

Cool, Funny and Cute Raw and Green T-Shirts

Check out this slide show of some really cute raw and green T-shirts and other items!

Add Yourself to Our Worldwide Map of Raw Foodists!

Our worldwide map of raw foodists!

Leafy Greens Café's Raw Onion Bread Sandwich

February 2, 2009 UPDATE on Location of Leafy Greens Café

Denise Becknell writes:

We are, once again, facing relocating the restaurant. This difficult task will prove to be worthwhile in the end. We have found a lovely and intimate yet conveniently located space that has amazing outdoor areas.

The challenges we faced getting the restaurant in the right place seems to have finally paid off. Our first visit felt like we had come home and I think you will agree!

There is ample parking behind the building with no parking meter issues. The lighting is ambient instead of fluorescent and the space is small and intimate. Our original goal was this type of space, but it took a lot of time and effort to find it!

We have a wonderful new landlord, who is excited to have us and willing to help us be successful rather than making demands on us that had previously caused us to struggle.

Many of our customers know the issues that we were facing at our previous locations and also know that we had just about given up on ever finding the right place for our café.

This new place has renewed our enthusiasm and has encouraged us to move forward in our effort to provide the community with the information they need to live a healthy, vibrant raw food lifestyle! It is through our own experience that we have gained the conviction and determination to introduce and support as many people as we can on the subject of raw food; its benefits, ingredients and preparation, while providing interesting lectures, hard-to-find ingredients and true friendship to those who are willing to reach out and join us on this amazing journey!

The best part of the new location is that we have an amazing meeting room available to hold cooking classes, lectures and events! This wonderful location has facilities that are shared by like-minded businesses and we are looking forward to being part of this progressive collection of individuals!

Our New Location will be:

1431 Central Avenue

St. Petersburg, FL 33705

Our hours of operation will be changing:

Tues-Thur 11 am to 7 pm, Fri-Sat 11 am to 8 pm, Sunday 11-5

Our Review of the Café's Original Location

Raw foodists love fabulous food, and the onion bread sandwich at Leafy Greens Café in North Redington Beach, Florida is the real deal! In fact, it's called "The Real Deal" on their menu! When you go there (and I highly recommend it as a destination, should you not live in that area), also make sure to order their fabulous raw pizza. And their sprouted lentil soup. The high-ceilinged space features lots of windows and a palm-tree-and-bamboo motif, with stained-glass-and-carved-wood ceiling fans. Owner Denise Becknell says it's about much more than the food, "It's about community." They plan to hold an open house, with free food, four times a year. (The restaurant planned to open in September but is attracting so much interest that they are open now!)

Leafy Greens Café is thriving

This place is terrific. It seats 60 indoors and 60 outdoors and is right across the street from the beach--what a location! Denise, who owned Italian restaurants in New York previously, went raw in early 2007 after she was diagnosed with systemic lupus (an autoimmune disease), and was completely healed four months later. Her husband, Doug, is the chef, and has done a masterful job of switching from carnivorous to raw vegan dishes.

Every Raw Foodist's Kitchen Will Want One of These!

There's a new product, the Coway Megasonic Cleaning Device, that cleans pesticide off of produce. Here's how it works:

The word Megasonic describes a sound that cannot be heard by the human ear. It is a type of sound wave that vibrates over 40,000 times a second. Especially, Coway's megasonic cleaning device has the frequency of over 1,000,000Hz. Once this megasonic sound wave, which is emitted from a vibrating element, reaches the solution, tiny bubbles are made. These bubbles become bigger, and eventually burst, resulting in a powerful energy. This megasonic process not only completely cleanses the surface of an object, but also removes foreign materials from the little gaps in an object's surface. With this megasonic technology, it is possible to remove pesticides from vegetables and plaque from the teeth.

Utah's First Raw Foods Restaurant

Wow, even Utah has a raw foods restaurant. This is definitely catching on! And I'm loving it! Although I haven't been to this raw cafe (my excuse is that I live in Florida), I like the way this restaurant reviewer writes about it.

Pop Idol Jason Mraz is Into Raw Foods!

Rawlicious in Toronto

Rawlicious is a new raw foods restaurant in Toronto. I haven't been there yet, but I love their sign!

Raw Food is Now A Marketing Tool for Vitamins!

A vitamin company that has a two-page ad in the July/August EnergyTimes magazine is differentiating its vitamins from those of other companies by saying that theirs are raw! This is some kind of marketing breakthrough for raw foods. I mean, raw foods is now considered a popular enough and healthful enough thing that vitamin companies are jumping on the bandwagon! This is very, very interesting!

Thanks to my mother for tipping me off about this ad.

Pocket Guide to Safest Produce

Sometimes we can't find the organic fruits and vegetables we want or need for a recipe. And we might resort to buying conventionally grown ones. But certain types of non-organic produce are loaded with toxins from pesticides and herbicides and we want to avoid them. The Organic Center has a pocket-sized guide on their site, a free download, showing which fruits and veggies are the most contaminated with chemicals. This guide is a great resource for anyone, especially people who are into raw vegan food!

Fruit Vegetables Nuts and Seeds

Fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds are the basic building blocks of raw vegan cuisine. Here is an online store whose sweet clothing for babies, kids, teens, women, men (plus home decor) all bears that message.

Restaurant with Movie Marquee

Raw foodists love when omnivorous restaurants add raw vegan dishes to their menus. And advertise that with pride, in big bold signage! Bravo to Sarasota, Florida's Zoria on Main Street.

A Fabulous New Raw Food Restaurant in Miami

First cousins Chef John Schott and business partner Christian Gonzalez

Miami, Florida is lucky to have an exciting new raw restaurant, LifeFood Gourmet. I ate there yesterday for the first time and was really impressed. The gifted chef John Schott and his business partner and first cousin Christian Gonzalez (in his first-ever restaurant), have come up with a big hit.

LifeFood Gourmet in Miami, Florida

LifeFood Gourmet is open Thursday through Sunday, from noon to 9 p.m. and inhabits a small, second floor space, with what I counted to be seating for 16 (although I might have counted wrong), with brown and tan walls and purple tablecloths. The small kitchen is visible at one end of the room and Chef Schott prepares menu items as people order them. I got there early and had my pick of tables, but the place filled up fast, with what had to be the best looking bunch of diners I've ever seen in a restaurant. Young, slim and handsome, including several couples with children, they could have been out of central casting. Christian, who grew up in Cartagena, Colombia with John ("like brothers"), said that the energy of the food makes people beautiful.

I'd read about LifeFood Gourmet on a blog, and decided to order exactly what the blogger had, although, being a foodie, what I really wanted (eyes bigger than my stomach) was to get to eat every single thing on the menu. I began with "Tato's Crazy Chz Nacho." The nachos were crispy and paper thin, with a delicate flavor, and served with fresh salsa, homemade guacamole, pumpkin spiced "carne molita," nacho pine nut cheese and Brazil sour creme. OMG, I thought as I ate this delectable appetizer, this might be their signature dish. (But how could I know without tasting everything on their menu?)

Next I opted for pizza, and they brought me two kinds, Texy Mexy Super Veggie and NYC Cheese--a total of four thin-crust slices served atop a wire basket that rose dramatically above the table. While I liked both varieties, the NYC Cheese was pitch perfect in evoking the Italian pizza (known as "Tomato Pie") that I grew up eating in northern New Jersey. I've never before experienced that essence in a raw vegan pizza. What a treat!

I looked forward to dessert. The restaurant was out of the "Trisha Fall in Love" cupcake that the blogger had had, and suggested their Chocolate Mousse cake instead. But I had to leave suddenly for the three-and-a-half hour drive back to Sarasota because of threatening weather, so I brought the dessert home with me and somehow managed to save it until after dinner tonight. It was lush, chocolatey and sweet and, like all the best entertainment, left me wanting more.

Before leaving LifeFood Gourmet to try and escape the looming rain storm, I found a few moments to drink the remainder of the Vanilla Dream Shake that my friend had ordered but was too full to drink. It was sublime.

As you leave the restaurant, there's a delightful non-culinary surprise, an architectural treat I had never seen before. It's a large mirror that hangs in the stairwell, so that when you walk downstairs to exit, you see yourself from top to bottom (looking gorgeous from the food, of course!)

I can only hope that John and Christian will open a raw cafe in Sarasota next. Otherwise, I just might have to move to Miami!

LifeFood Gourmet
Open Thursday through Sunday
From noon to 9 p.m.
786-523-9669
786-587-2223

New York City

Raw foodists love NYC because it has many all-raw restaurants. It's a raw foodists' paradise. And so is the state of California, for the same reason. Now the rest of the country needs to catch up!

Delicious Salads Like This One

Dandelion greens, raddiccio, cilantro, sunflower greens, red & yellow grape tomatoes, and red onion slices, with lemon tahini garlic dressing.

Underground Raw Vegan Dinners

There's a trend towards throwing so-called underground dinners, to save chefs the cost of restaurant overhead, and yet to fly under the radar of health departments requiring licenses.

So c'mon over and join the latest online group, this one for Sarasota, Florida area raw vegans who look forward to organizing and attending pirate restaurants as they occur.

Spreading the Word About Raw Food

Raw foods enthusiasts like to get the word out about their passions. One place they find the goods is this shop, whose items urge the US Department of Agriculture to lift the ban on the sale of raw almonds. The USDA imposed the ban on Sept. 1, 2007, because of two long-ago cases of salmonella in NON-ORGANIC almonds, and because of this, raw foodists and raw foodies are having to order raw almonds from abroad.