Raw Baby Shower

Whew, what a day! It started pretty early with me buzzing around the kitchen preparing dishes to take to a baby shower. One of the dishes is one of my absolute favorite and simple summer fruit salads containing just three ingredients – watermelon chunks, pineapple chunks, and fresh chopped chocolate mint leaves. I got the inspiration for it from a Whole Foods sampling awhile back of just a pineapple chunk and a watermelon chunk on a toothpick with a mint leaf between them. It was amazing! Cool, refreshing, flavorful, and gorgeous. Luckily my chocolate mint plant in my garden is coming back with vengeance providing plenty for the salad.

I minced the leaves into small chunks and tossed with the pineapple and watermelon. I bought two watermelons from Costco for this salad, but it turned out I only needed half of one. No worries, the rest won’t go to waste in this house!

It’s such a simple and fun salad, I recommend it for a fast and easy dish for summer BBQs and gatherings.

I’d also planned to take a huge batch of chocolate avocado mousse with fresh strawberries for dipping. I picked up the avocados from Costco yesterday which was a daring move risking not being able to find ripe ones. Luckily I found a pretty ripe bag after a few minutes of digging – not perfect planning, but it worked out! This batch used six huge avocados.

Good thing I got a 14-cup food processor!

Which I made a huge mess of – totally worth it. The chocolate mouse came out amazing, not too sweet with a nice, rich chocolate flavor.

We arrived an hour early to get everything set up and the food spread was pretty sweet offering a lot of raw vegan options since the mom-to-be enjoys a high raw, vegan diet.

I prepared a huge bowl of strawberries to go with the chocolate avocado mousse.

And a big bowl of the mint fruit salad.

Plenty of nuts.

And fabulous fresh strawberry lemonade.

Plenty of huge veggie trays with Gena’s Broccoli Hummus my sister made for the party.

The shower ended up being a blast and a great opportunity to expose how wonderful a whole foods, healthy diet can taste. Many of the guests did not believe the mousse was made out of avocado and eating it like a pudding spooning it onto their plates. And we discovered the fruit salad, jicama sticks and celery sticks were also wonderful dipped in the mousse. They were also super impressed with how tasty the veggie based hummus was, my sister did an awesome job on that. I was thrilled that all my fruit salad, strawberries and mousse disappeared. And I had a wonderful time hanging out with girlfriends while not having to endure too much baby talk. :-)