Mary's Secret Garden

Had a delicious meal at Mary's in Ventura tonight. I ordered the Rawviolis which were "jicama sheets filled with itallian herbed almond cheese topped with bell pepper marinara and basil pesto garnished with baby mixed greens and cherry tomatos". The cheese was GREAT and the bell pepper marinara was smooth and rich. Here's a link to the menu if you want to check it out MARY'S SECRET GARDEN For desert I had the Special which was a Raw German Chocolate Cake with Coconut Ice Cream. I attempted to take a picure, see above, but my camera phone wasn't great. It is SO good, especialy the coconut ice cram and chocolate ganache. The cake was great too but considering I am allergic to walnuts and it was packed full of them it was a little pain with my pleasure. I bought a pint of the coconut ice cream I will have to finish by tomorrow night. Alex said he would help ;)

Santa Monica

Yesterday I had the BEST day with Stacey (pictured above). She is my long time friend, one of my best friends, and we even have 4 matching tattoos together. We went to Real Food Daily in Santa Monica on Wednesday night. They had just opened up the other side of the restaurant, which was a remodel to include a take out/tapas type section you can grab to go or small items from. Well the wait was about 20 minutes so we went to the take out side to wait. It was their first night and they were very disorganized and we didn't get our food(snacks) until the table in the restaurant was ready and then they wouldn't let us take it to our table. Not even our tea. I'm sure they will work the system out but it was annoying. As far as raw food goes they didn't have a whole lot to offer at this location. I remember the Hollywood location having more options. It's a good thing I ordered before I remembered their NACHOS or I might have caved.

The next day we went to take our friend to the airport and we stopped at the co-op which had an overwhelming amount of packaged raw food, including fresh food from local businesses. Then we did some shopping, and went to Euphoria loves RAWvolution on Main. I got a smoothie, strawberry with young coconut. It was good but I felt it was not 8$ good. Certainly not as good as my smoothie from Juliano's Raw pictured above. We went to the beach after that and then I went and got my hair cut by Stacey's friend Eric. He did a really grest job turning it into a much better version of what it was supposed to be before. Yay! After that we went to Juliano's.

We started with an AMAZING Chocolate Shake for Stacey and a "Iced Coffee" Smoothie for me. Next we moved onto soups. Our Avocado and Warm Totilla Soups (pictured above) were SO great, and even better mixed together!

Then they brought our entres. I was already getting full as the soup and smoothie were rich and delicious and I have been eating mostly fruit and salad on this trip. I was overwhelmed by the size and beauty of our plates.
Stace got the Lasagna with creamy cashew cheese and sundried tomato sauce. It came with a cabbage slaw and some "steamed" veggies.

I got the "Western Bacon Burger" which came with slaw, "steamed" veggies, and Zucchini fries.
I was warned previously that Juliano's wasn't very good because the food was over processed and hard to digest. I found that the soup and smoothie were very digestable and delicious. The fries were a little over done, the burger was good but I can see were they were coming from. However as a treat, especialy if you are new to raw foods or on a vacation, you should definetly go for it because of the novelty alone and the experience.