I read the directions on the bag 2 or 3 times to make sure I didn't mess it up. I didn't even tweak the recipe, which I normally do. The instructions looked simple enough. Surely I could do it!
All I had to do was defrost the sauce bag in a bowl of warm water and crisp up the chicken things.
Heated up my stone coated frying pan, added a swirl of olive oil, tossed in the frozen, pretend chicken breast pieces.
I took much care to make sure that the pieces browned and got crispy without overcooking (that was the big warning on the bag).
Last 30 seconds, I squeezed the sauce into the pan with the rather flat Gardein and heated away. I felt very successful as my kids were wandering in the kitchen and asking, "What are you cooking Mom? It smells like chicken!" Yes, they were incredulous because I haven't cooked meat in my home for many months.
Like the package suggested, I served the Gardein with steamed broccoli and rice - brown with vegetable broth. Dinner looked fabulous! All the right colors - even the kids were excited!
Then, nobody wanted to be the one to take the first bite. "I'm waiting until YOU try it." Mikey from the Life cereal commercials doesn't live with us, so we couldn't make him the guinea pig. Finally the younger tasted it and screamed, "yuck! I am giving this a zero" on a scale of 1 to 10. And, yes, she spit it out. Mind you, she hasn't spit out food for 4 years. The older kid tried the Gardein piece solo and declared, "I give it a 2, but don't make it again. Love the rice and the broccoli, Mom." Trying to let me down easy, I suppose.
Skeptically, I stuck a piece in my mouth. The sauce was tasty. I liked the crispiness of the "meat" but not the texture inside. It was like (I'm grasping as descriptive words here) chewing on a dense pound cake, but little wetter. I'm sorry, but when I feel like eating chicken, I do not want to eat cake all of the sudden.
I determined that it wasn't horrible; the kids agreed; and that it was emergency food. After explaining to my little one WHAT emergency food was - in a bind we could, feasibly, eat it, they agreed. So then we tried combining the Gardein WITH other food - rice, broccoli, or all together. A little better. The older one bumped up her number to a 3, the younger gave it a 1. We tried sprinkling more soy sauce on. No dice.
Then Daddy came on the scene. The younger one warned, "It's emergency food, Dad! You may not like it!" The older, "yeah Dad. I gave it a 3." Way to keep him objective. Great job. So I chimed in, "it's not awful, but it's not good, either." That really worried him because usually I am the positive one about trying new food.
He smothered his with soy sauce and bottled ghost chile sauce and said it was fine.
>Note: ghost chile sauce is so hot and strong that you can not taste anything else but the chile.<
He ate all of his Gardein. I bargained with the kids to eat more of theirs so they could eat a Cutie clementine. I ate mine, but only with rice or broccoli. We still had a few pieces left in the pan. Hubby offered to give them to the dog. I screamed, "No! She's probably allergic to them!"
Hubby countered, "great, we can't give it to the dogs but we're making our kids eat it. Nice."
We have 3 more bags of different Gardein things: beef tips, chicken piccolini, and chicken tenders. I'm going to wait a few weeks before I subject my family to another experiment like that one.
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