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!

Chicken Pesto Sandwich from Valley Caterers

I ate a sandwich from Valley Caterers in Valley Stream, New York. Apparently they won some sort of Best of Long Island award in 2007 that they are very proud of. They had all sorts of food in their deli...

And I ended up eating a Chicken Pesto Sandwich on a sesame egg roll. The sandwich consisted of chicken, roasted red peppers, fresh mozzarella, and pesto. It was tasty, although I would have preferred more mozzarella and less chicken. The sandwich was good, but I don't know if I would go as far to say it was the best of Long Island...

Il Porto

I ate at a restaurant called Il Porto in Manhattan's South Street Seaport. Since it was a very hot summer day, we were lucky to sit near an open door to the nearby Dead People exhibit, which blasted us with nice air conditioning. Soon enough, the meal started out with a loaf of bread.

I ordered the Pizza alla Pesto which consisted of mozzarella cheese, ricotta cheese, pesto, and basil leaves, all on a crispy pizza crust. It was very tasty. It wasn't what I would think of as the typical New York Style pizza, but it was still delicious...

After eating, the next stop was to walk over to the Playing the Building exhibit up the road. On the way there, I explored the South Street Seaport for a bit:

And then I finally reached my destination and enjoyed Playing the Building: