Fresh Gourmet - Sesame beef & noodle salad. Review & Recipe

I was recently sent a selection of Fresh Gourmet salad sprinkles (I'm sure there's a better term), to try out for you, my lucky readers.  Fresh Gourmet are the leading brand in the US for salad toppings, and have now launched in the UK.  I received 4 bags to try out:  Crispy Onions, Cheese & Garlic Croutons, Sea Salt & Cracked Black Pepper Croutons, and Basil Pesto Ciabatta Croutons.

I set to making a special summer salad to try out some of my new noms... why not give it a try yourself?

Sesame Beef & Noodle Salad
Serves 1 as a main meal, or 2 as a side
Ingredients
100g beef strips
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tbsp sesame seeds
60g rice vermicelli
Half red pepper, diced
Handful lambs lettuce
Splash of olive oil for cooking.
Fresh Gourmet crispy onions to taste
Fresh Gourmet cheese & garlic croutons to taste

Pour the maple syrup into a bowl, add the beef strips & toss to coat well.
Add the sesame seeds & coat the beef strips well.
Heat a frying pan with a small amount of olive oil, add the beef strips & cook on a medium heat until cooked through.  Place to one side to cool.
Boil the kettle.
Place the vermicelli in a large bowl, and cover with boiling water, cooking to the instructions on the pack (mine said 3 minutes)
Rinse the cooked vermicelli under cold water to cool down, and place into a serving bowl
Place the lambs lettuce & diced pepper on top of the vermicelli.
Add the beef strips, you can use some of the maple sesame glaze as a salad dressing if you like.
Sprinkle on the crispy onions & croutons.

I enjoyed putting together something a bit different, all too often my salads are just a boring mix of lettuce, tomato & cucumber, which is why I don't bother with them all that often!  If you've met me, that will be all too obvious.

The crispy onions were great, they added a lovely hit of flavour, the only danger is I can see myself tucking into them straight from the bag, and I'm sure that's not what they're designed for!  The croutons are baked, rather than fried, which gives them a slightly softer texture than fried croutons, which is quite welcome.  I find many commercially bought fried croutons are too hard and rip my mouth to pieces.  And the flavour of the cheese & garlic were lovely, they really added something extra to the salad.

I haven't yet tried out the sea salt & cracked black pepper, I'm thinking that they will go well with some homemade tomato soup, and the basil pesto ciabatta croutons are waiting for me to do some sort of chicken caesar salad, they'll work well with the flavours in that I think.

Fresh Gourmet toppings are now available in Tesco stores in the UK for around £2.00 a pack, which I think is really good value, the packs will last for ages (unless, like me, you decide to eat them instead of crisps!)

Disclosure: I was provided with the above 4 packs of Fresh Gourment toppings free of charge for the purposes of this review. I was not told what to write and all opinions are my own. Links are provided for convenience, I am not a member of any affiliate scheme & will not receive payment for their use.  By producing my own unique recipe using the ingredients I was provided, I have been given the opportunity to enter a prize draw to win kitchen utensils.

Good Natured Salads - Review

Despite what the weather would have you believe, the calendar definitely says it's summer at the moment.  And when summertime rolls around, then the healthy food comes out.

The kind people at Good Natured Salad offered me the chance to try out some of their salad range, so I popped to the shops, and came back with a punnet of Tantalising Baby Plum Tomatoes & a Cool Cucumber.  The range also includes Perfect Peppers, , Awesome Aubergines and vine tomatoes, but they didn't stock them at my store.

Good Natured don't use pesticides, they use good bugs to keep the bad bugs away, which means that their veggies are pesticide residue free, and the way nature intended.  The natural theme was kept going with the tomato punnet being made from cardboard (and easily recycled), rather than the more usual plastic.

Now, while my thoughts may turn to salad, I'm a carbosaurus at heart.  No Carbs, No Comment.  So my salads tend to lean towards the pasta-y side.  After munching my way through a handful of tomatoes waiting for the water to boil, I added some pasta, basil & cheese to my toms & cuke, and made myself a bowl of salad.  What you can't see, despite my best attempts, is that I took my cue from the veggies, and used tricolor pasta, just for the pretty colours.

The tomatoes are fab.  I tend to buy baby plum tomatoes anyway, they've got so much more flavour, but these were beautiful, plump & juicy.  And tomatoes are full of lycopene, which helps protect your skin from the sun.  If we ever get any, that is!  And they're so sweet, even the veg-phobic Squeaky managed to eat a couple! (Too fast for me to record the moment for blogging posterity, I'm afraid)

I'm not quite sure what to say about the cucumber.  It's a cucumber. If it tasted of anything much, it wouldn't be.  It was crisp and chopped up well, and bright green & white like a cucumber should be, but they're sort of hard to get excited about.

I was a bit sad that I didn't get to try out the peppers. I do like a nice pepper in my salad, they add a good bit of flavour & crunch, as well as being chock-ful of vitamins.  I once knew a girl who ate them like apples, but I prefer to leave them in rings, or turn them into pasta sauce.

I'm still a little bit puzzled by the inclusion of aubergines in a salad range.  Can you even eat aubergines raw? They're certainly in a different bit of the supermarket when I look.  I'm not arguing with aubergines, I love them, but they don't scream salad to me.  And I would have liked to see a salad leaf of some sort in the range, I'm a traditional girl at heart and I like a bit of lettuce in my salad.

Good Natured Salads are available in selected Asda stores.  And if you look carefully at the photo above, you'll see that there's a competition on the packs right now to win a holiday with Featherdown Farm!  If that doesn't attract at least a few eyes, I don't know what will!

EDIT: I just finished up the tomatoes today, and took the plastic off to separate for recycling.  Then I noticed on the back that Good Natured have a few farms across the UK, including one in the Rhymney Valley, South Wales.  And that my tomatoes had actually come from that farm.  This is something I've seen on eggs a few times, detailing exactly where the food has come from, but I'd not seen it on veg before.  The Rhymney Valley is the next valley across from me, less than 10 miles away (even less from the Asda I bought them from), so my food miles are looking really healthy, and I feel great that I've supported local farmers.

I was provided with a voucher in order to purchase items from the Good Natured Salads range for the purposes of this review. I was not told what to write and all opinions are my own.  Links are provided for convenience, I am not a member of any affiliate schemes and will not receive any reward for their use.