Citrus spare ribs

This time, I followed directions. The second product I picked up with the coupons VegeUSA sent me was the Citrus Sparerib Cutlets. And I just followed the easy microwave directions. Combine with rice and steamed broccoli and Boom! dinner! Oh, and I sprinkled mine with gomashio because I do that.

The sweet, chewy nuggets are mostly soy based which is nice if you have issues with eating a ton of wheat gluten. The texture was fine microwaved, but I’ve also had these pan fried in the past and you can get a little crispy edge to them when you do that, but you also sacrifice some of the sauce.

The package ambitiously says there are 2.5 servings inside, but not in this house. It was a solid two servings for us though. The main downside to these is the price. At around $7, it’s more than I would normally pay for a fake meat for 2, but it’s still cheaper than ordering out. And I know there are a ton of people out there that don’t cook like I do and rely on prepared foods or eating out. So you might find this handy. In Atlanta, I found these and the pepper steak at Whole Foods on Ponce.

Black Pepper Steak and Noodles

vegeusa black pepper steaksWhy is it when I don’t have time to blog, I get a bunch of folks wanting to send me products to try? No worries, I’ll eventually get to talk about the goodies. This time VegeUSA offered to send me coupons for free product. I got excited cruising their website. I’ve had a few of their products, but they have a ton I haven’t tried. Sadly, when I got to the store, they only carried two I’d already had. So I decided to get a little experimental with one of them, the Vegan Black Pepper Steaks.

So, I took a partial bag of Trader Joe’s stir fry veggies, fried them up with some onion and then added the black pepper steaks and their juice. Then I added maybe a 1/4 cup of stock to make the sauce thinner. Then I mixed it up with some cooked rice noodles.

It was pretty good, but I think the sauce was diluted too much. Here’s what I should have done. Dress the cooked noodles with a little sesame oil and soy sauce, stir fry the veggies as I did and cook the pepper steaks separately according to package directions. Then mixed the veggies and noodles and put the pepper steaks on top rather than trying to make the sauce cover everything. Oh, look, I’m eating kale again.

The steak has a really nice texture. The sauce is asian-inspired, so you’ll want to keep that in mind when using this in a meal. The next product I try will be the Citrus Spareribs.