Good Eats: Mellow Mushroom

So for the last like 3 months Brittany has been trying to get me to go to this place in Citrus Park called the Mellow Mushroom.

I'd heard of a friend going there once and Brit went there a few weeks ago and came home raving about the pizza. I can have good pizza here, why would I drive to Tampa for pizza?Well, we went and I didn't order a pizza and neither did she. They actually have a lot of vegetarian friendly meal options including tempeh and tofu and that makes me happy. They also have gluten free options and vegan cheese.

We ordered the bruschetta and let me tell you that it was fabulous. The bread was crunchy but not hard as sometimes places end up giving you pieces of bread that were either left out too long or toasted so much that they flake and crumble or you chip a tooth. This was not the case at all and the toppings were very generous.


Tiny diced tomatoes, lots of crumbled feta (Brittany loves her feta), strips of basil (not sprinkled on basil from a shaker) and all of this was dressed with a pleasant balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing.

Brit ordered a grilled hoagie, which shocked me. She's not usually a sandwich type of girl but who am I to judge right? She ordered the tempeh but as a half sandwich so it came with celery but hers also came garnished with sprouts and there were enough sprouts to start a farm with. She said she bit into hers and it was nothing but sprouts. She ended up pushing most of it off but that's not a big deal.Her sandwich had onions, feta, mushrooms, peppers, tomato, lettuce and mayo on it.

I got the grilled portobello mushroom and cheese hoagie. So delicious. It comes with the mushrooms (obviously), artichoke, sun dried tomato, feta, spinach and pesto-mayo. Obviously I got mine sans spinach because we all know I hate spinach.

The food was really good. I enjoyed the music and the ambiance of the place. Of course Princess Ivory enjoyed screaming at the top of her lungs for puffs and harassing her mother and I every chance she got because we were stuffing our faces and not hers. One important thing to mention is that even though we didn't order pizza we were seated by the kitchen, as it is an open counter and you can see everything that goes on. That may or may not be a good thing, however, we could watch them hand toss the pizza crusts. Ivory found it entertaining and clapped for the guy tossing pies behind the counter. He found it amusing.

Vegan Cookie

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookie

Now I am not a big candy or cake/cupcakes person but I am very big on cookies and pie. I love fruit pies especially or fruit tarts. YUM. One thing that I love to do is spoil myself every now and then with a treat from Whole Foods.

When I lived in California there was a Whole Foods right across from the bookstore I worked in. I would go over and buy one of their individual fruit tarts and a vegan cookie for lunch. I'm not vegan (I need my dairy) but I have come to discover that I like vegan treats a lot more than I like your standard run-of-the-mill treat. That isn't to say I won't eat it, but I have found vegan cookies to taste better than regular cookies and so I will go out of my way to buy them. For this cookie I went to Tampa, a good 30 miles out of my way for one. They had fruit tarts but I obstained. The fruit tart probably would have been healthier but I was on a budget and I needed to stick to it.