Maison Le Grand

Maison Le Grand is a Montreal-based company that produces several types of pestos, sauces, and tapenades. They were kind enough to send me a sampling of their products to try. I suppose it's an unexpected perk of writing a food blog and what you see below is what I cooked with their products along with some thoughts.

Since I'm a big fan of pesto, I started by trying their pestos. Pesto and pasta is a classic combination, so I had to give it a try. Here's the Garden Pesto on angel hair pasta with shrimp and cannelloni beans. This pesto was vegan, but the lack of cheese wasn't missed. Out of the three pestos I tried, the Garden Pesto was my personal favorite.

Pesto also goes great on sandwiches. Here's my lunch one day consisting of egg, cheese, avocado, spinach, sliced radish, and the 4 Nut & Cheese Pesto on whole wheat bread. I wasn't sure how well the avocado and radish would taste with the pesto, but I actually thought it was a pretty tasty combination.

For Maison Le Grand's Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto, I went back to the default pesto and pasta. It was good, but being a person that isn't a huge fan of tomatoes, I preferred the greener pestos.

Moving on to other types of sauces, next up is Maison Le Grand's Lemon Confit & Pumpkin Seed Aromatic Sauce. With this, I made a dish consisting of brown rice, garbanzo beans, pickled turnips, onions, and spinach. It ended up having a great citrus flavor. I also found the Lemon Confit & Pumpkin Seed Aromatic Sauce went really well with shrimp.

Pictured here is Maison Le Grand's Spicy Olive and Sun Dried Tomato Tapenade on a cracker. I also tried the mild version of the tapenade and decided that the spicy was my favorite. It had a nice kick to it, although the tapenade's spiciness was a bit too much for a few other people that tasted it.

Overall, Maison Le Grand definitely has some tasty sauces. I liked just about all of them and the pouches that the sauces come packaged in are just plain cool. I've never seen any other sauces packaged in their type of astronaut food type pouch!

If you want to try Maison Le Grand's products, they are available at Whole Foods and The Fresh Market in the Orlando area. Be sure to check out their website, follow them on Twitter, and become their fan on Facebook. Give them a try!