My parents are the best. Home for the holiday’s and the refrigerator is stocked with soy and almond milk and the pantry with nooch (nutritional yeast), vital gluten, quinoa, soy flour, not-beef and chicken broth and the list goes on and on! My mom was also nice enough to buy a couple gardein products for me. One I haven’t tried before is the new Gardein Seasoned Bites. Since the box didn’t offer much direction on what dishes to use these little bites in I decided to make tacos with them. I sautéed some red onion and green bell pepper, chopped up the bites to smaller bites and added a couple teaspoons of my taco seasoning.It looked divine, smelled like the most delicious tacos ever created (mind you I was starving so just about anything would have smelled delicious at this point). I toasted my taco shells, and stuffed them with the seasoned bites, lettuce and fresh salsa. It was so beautiful that I spent 5 minutes looking for a camera to take a picture of my magnificent lunch but the growling from my stomach said that photos would have to wait for another day and it was time to chow down. I took my first excited bite and was disappointed. The texture was fine, and my taco seasoning is always amazing but there was one fundamental problem that I’ve begun to notice with gardein products – all the sauces taste the same. These seasoned bites tasted just like the Gardein Tuscan Breast. Basically, these were just the Tuscan Breast cut up and repackaged. I was expecting a clean slate to work with but that’s not what I got. I’m really disappointed at the lack of originality in the sauces that Gardein uses. These would’ve been perfect if they were just lightly seasoned, with no sauce, and allow the bites to be a clean palate that are versatile enough to incorporate into any dish or recipe.
first showed up on the market a little under a year ago I was ecstatic! I've never been the greatest at pressing all the water out of tofu. Wrapping it in towels, then weighting it, changing the towels and weighting it again or attempting to squeeze it as hard as possible without breaking the form of the tofu were both unattractive options but there has never been alternative. I headed to the 
, and of course Tofu Scramble. When making tofu scramble I like a lighter press so I just popped my tofu in the Tofuxpress for about 10-15 minutes while prepping the other ingredients and that was enough time to drain out at least ¼ cup of water from the tofu! The Tofuxpress is also great for marinating but here’s the secret – once you’ve pressed all the water out, take the tofu out and cut it into 4 sheets or cube it while still I the tofu express. Then marinate for desired amount of time and press out a little more before using in your recipe. If you don’t cut up your tofu before marinating then the marinade won’t go all the way through your tofu.
