Florida Food Finds

I haven’t been home much this summer so the bad news is there hasn’t been a lot of time to cook or work on recipes.  The good news is that I can tell you about some fun places I’ve gone too.  I recently got back from a 2 week trip to Florida (Fort Myers area).  I spent about half the time at the beach/pool (see picture above with me and my 2 favorite people) and the other half of the time staring out the window at the pool during the daily long thunderstorms.  Unfortunately, that didn’t leave a lot of time for finding fun foodie places but I did visit a few…

When you first get to Florida of course the first thing you have to do is get orange juice right???  Our first stop was getting some fresh orange juice at Sun Harvest and we of course had to get our picture with the giant orange out front.

It’s a rather cute touristy type shop with all sorts of citrus fruit, juices, a bakery, tourist items, and even orange soft serve ice cream.  There’s even a small playground outside but unfortunately, it was WAY too hot to play!  You can even order all sorts of things off the Sun Harvest website if you can’t make it to Florida.

Another fun place we went to was Rita’s.  A cute custard and Italian ice shop.  Rita’s is a chain but I’ve never been in one.  Although now that I think about it, I think I vaguely remember seeing one while visiting Atlanta a few months ago.

They had all sorts of flavors or Italian ice and you could even get a combination of Italian ice and custard.  I went with the chocolate chocolate chip Italian ice.

We only tried the Italian ice but next time we’ll have to try out the custard.

You may remember that I recently went to Michigan in my Michigan Food Tour post.  While I was there, I didn’t have a chance to have any yummy Detroit type pizza but lucky for me, there is a Jet’s Pizza location in Florida!  A thick, deep dish, yummy cheesy pizza!  Mmmmmm….

I guess it’s a good thing that people retire from Michigan and move south so that they can bring all my Detroit favorites with them!  Now if they would only open up a Jet’s Pizza around me in Connecticut, I would be happy!

Last but not least was a great ice cream shop called Love Boat.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they have a website, but they do have a Facebook page.

Don’t worry, they do NOT play the Love Boat TV show theme song when you walk in.  :)

Might not look like much on the outside, but on the inside, lots of great ice cream and some fun flavors.

And some fun cones!  Check out those cones!  They also had all sorts of sundaes and other ice cream treats.

The portions were quite large and prices were reasonable.  The ice cream was so good I couldn’t even get my daughter to look at me for a picture!  Wish they had a website with the flavors listed because now I don’t remember what the names of the flavors we had were!!  They were all good though!

Wish I had more to share from our Florida trip.  Didn’t make it to a few places I wanted to try so I guess that means I’ll have to go back!!!