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!

Harmoni Market in College Park, FL

I ate lunch at Harmoni Market in Orlando's College Park neighborhood during an unexpected detour caused from an I-4 closure. The service was a bit weird when we entered, the group of employees standing at the bar ignored us for a few minutes until someone finally told us to sit anywhere. This awkwardness was followed by a drink being served in a cup covered in lipstick stains, but after the initial weirdness, the food and service were good.

I ordered the Rockin Goat Flatbread. It consisted of rock shrimp, arugula, goat cheese, homemade mozzarella, and tomato sauce all on a whole wheat flatbread (baked by the Olde Hearth Bread Company). Although they called it a flatbread, it was technically a variation of a pizza. Seafood and pizza combinations always seem strange to me, but I liked this a lot. I'd gladly get it again! My only real complaint was that Harmoni was really stingy with the goat cheese. For a flatbread with goat in the name, I was expecting less mozzarella and more goat cheese crumbles.

When looking over Harmoni Market's menu, it seemed to be somewhat overpriced (especially on the sandwiches). Since I shared the flatbread and there were plenty of rock shrimp on it, what I ordered wasn't too bad. It came out to about $5 a person and filled me up.

Country Bob's All Purpose Sauce & Contest

A few months ago, the Watch Me Eat Blog was offered two bottles of Country Bob's All Purpose Sauce to try and review. I am not one to turn down free stuff, especially when it comes to trying new food, so I gladly accepted. A few days later, a box filled with the bottles of sauce arrived in the mail.

On the bottle, it recommended the sauce be used on steak, hamburgers, chicken, fries, or barbecue. I chose to be difficult and didn't use the sauce on any of the above when I tried it the first time. I used the sauce to top a dish of pasta!

The second time I ate Country Bob's Sauce, it was used as a gravy to flavor the inside of a shepard's pie...

Finally, I got a chance to try Country Bob's Sauce on something that was (almost) recommended on the bottle. I had a Boca Burger and dipped the meatless burger into Country Bob's All Purpose Sauce. Eating the sauce on a burger definitely gave the best idea of what it actually tasted like. The initial taste of the sauce reminded me of ketchup, but after a few seconds it left a spicier aftertaste, very similar to some barbecue sauces. I liked it!

The Country Bob's Sauce Giveaway is over. Congratulations to Lego and TASTYCHOMPS! You have won free sauce! Please check your email for more information. Winners were randomly chosen by being assigned a comment number and then using random.org to pick the two winners.

Peppino's Ristorante Italiano

I ate at Peppino's Ristorante Italiano in Oviedo, FL. One of the first things I noticed upon entering the restaurant was that I seemed to be the youngest one eating by forty years. That didn't last long when about 100 people entered the restaurant for an Oviedo High School Basketball team banquet. From that point on, the restaurant got very loud. Luckily, our order was in before the banquet, so the food didn't take too long.

Salad came first.

For the main course, I ordered a tortellini dish served in a pink sauce with ham and mushrooms. I asked for no mushrooms, but I really didn't see any ham on the plate either. Besides from that, it was pretty good. The sauce was definitely homemade and although it wasn't as creamy as most other pink sauces I've come across, it was still very tasty. The sauce was definitely much more interesting that what I've had at other local Italian restaurants.

The other person I was eating with did complain that their portion was tiny for what Peppino's charged, but my tortellini was enough.

Chicken & Eggplant from Imperial Dynasty

I ate at Imperial Dynasty in Longwood, FL for lunch. I ordered the Chicken & Eggplant with Garlic Sauce lunch special. It came with the chicken, rice, and a choice of a side.

Fried noodles were served first.

They were followed by the side. I went with some Wonton soup. In the past, I've always been happy with the soup from Imperial Dynasty, but on this visit I found it to be way too salty.

The soup was followed with the main dish. The Chicken & Eggplant was pretty much what the menu described it to be. There was lots of chicken and lots of Chinese eggplant, and not much else. There was a side of brown rice, but I felt the meal needed more variety. There was way too much of the same thing, and it would have been better if there was some other types of vegetables in with the chicken and eggplant. Just something to mix up the monotony of the meal a bit.

It did taste good though, so I guess that's all that matters for the most part.


Like Sanford's China Wok, Imperial Dynasty also had posters hanging up to be one of the Top 100 Chinese Restaurants. The 2008 contest is over, it looks like Imperial Dynasty made it into the top 100 on the winners list. I don't see China Wok...

Publix Spicy Roll

I ate a Spicy Roll from the Sushi department at Publix in Lake Mary, FL. The roll was pretty similiar to the Tsunami Roll, but was filled with krab instead of shrimp salad. I think this sauce was spicier than the sauce on the Tsunami roll as well.

Papa Joe's Pizza (Lake Mary, FL)

Papa Joes used to be a local chain of really popular Italian restaurants in the Central Florida area. Their Altamonte Springs and Lake Mary Blvd locations almost always had a wait, and then they started to expand. As they opened up more and more restaurants in the area, their food and service became worse and worse. After a while the restaurants weren't worth eating at anymore. Eventually other people must have gotten the same feeling because the restaurants seemed to no longer have waits to eat, and Papa Joes closed all of their restaurants except for two in Lake Mary and one in Altamonte Springs.

I went to the Papa Joes in the Colonial Town Center in Lake Mary, FL for the first time in years. I had garlic bread and a cheese pizza. The garlic bread was disappointing and was nothing more than a roll topped with that garlic butter stuff and some parmesan cheese. I don't think there was any actual garlic.

Papa Joe's pizza seemed to go into a downward spiral back when I used to eat at the restaurants more often until it wasn't worth ordering anymore. When I ordered the pizza on this visit, I was surprised with the result. The pizza was actually pretty good. My only complaint was about the sauce. I found it to be way too sweet, but other than that the pie was pretty good. It didn't come close to King Umbertos standards (best pizza ever), but was definitely a few steps above many other local pizzas.

Chinese Food at Princeton Junction's First Wok

I ate at the First Wok Chinese Restaurant in Princeton Junction, NJ. I started off with an order of Scallion Pancakes, mostly because Chinese Restaurants in Florida do not serve them for some reason. They tasted fine, but were a bit too flaky and didn't hold together as well as other scallion pancakes that I have eaten in the past.

I ordered Chicken with Black Bean Sauce as the main dish. It was very good, with the tender chicken mixed with peppers and onions, all topped with black bean sauce. I ate the dish with brown rice. I had no complaints about the chicken...

I also liked how they automatically give everyone a tea cup and leave the tea pot on the table. This seems to be a northern thing because I can't think of any Chinese restaurants in Florida that do this. In Florida, if you want tea, you have to ask and get charged extra for it...