Goody Good Stuff Sweets – Review and Giveaway

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As you know I don’t often eat sweets. I don’t have a naturally sweet tooth so I don’t really mind when people from work sometimes bring in non vegan sweets, biscuits and cakes. However, I know that there are many vegans and vegetarians out there who do eat sweets and one of the most common gripes is how difficult it is to find gummy sweets without gelatin in. There are also plenty of people who aren’t necessarily vegetarian or vegan but don’t want to eat crushed up animal bones in their sweets! In my younger days, I did enjoy sour gummy sweets, particularly those cola bottles that were so sour they made your face pucker.

Goody Good Stuff have a range of sweets that don’t contain gelatin. They are all vegetarian and 4 of them are vegan. As well as the gelatin, they don’t have any artificial colours or flavourings and use only natural fruit and vegetable juices. They were kind enough to send me a packet each of the vegan flavours to try, so I decided to share them at work. I didn’t say that they were vegan, but just left them on the table in the staff room at work as we normally do.

They certainly disappeared pretty quickly. Unsurprisingly, I liked the cola flavour the best and ate nearly the whole packet before the other people at work even realised they were there. In general, the peach ones seemed to be the most popular with the others but none of them lingered around for long. No-one commented that they were weird or vegan tasting! If I’m going to eat sweets, these are the type I’d eat more of, and if I had children, these are the sweets I’d be putting in their party bags or lunchboxes.

Goody Good Stuff have kindly offered to send a packet of each of the vegan flavours to one of my lucky readers. To be in with a chance to win, just leave a comment on my blog saying why you’d like to win. UK only please. I’ll draw one out at random on January 30th.

Food Network Friday – Bayou Chicken Pasta

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It was my turn to pick FNF this time. I cannot describe the mind numbing fear this induces in me and I understand why Tami tends to delegate the task to others! I spent hours combing the website, rejecting recipe after recipe as too easy, too hard, too similar to something we’ve already done, too reliant on out of season ingredients etc. This time I drew up a shortlist of 5 and asked Matthew to pick one. Emerils’s Bayou Chicken Pasta was the result.

I’ve chosen Emeril dishes before. I’ve never seen his programme but his recipes appeal to me so I was glad to see that Food Network UK have started to show one of them, so I’ve been recording them. I had an extra challenge this FNF – my omni brother was staying with me for a week so it needed to appeal to him too.

I was pleased to find a small pot of Emeril’s essence already mixed in my cupboard which must have been left over from something else. Chicken flavoured seitan would have been the obvious choice but we’d been eating a lot of it so I went for tofu. I could have baked it or dry fried it keep it firm but I actually pressed it and tore it up so some bits were bigger than others. There was nothing scientific about it!

Otherwise, everything was very easy. I toyed with using a home made cashew cream but time was against me so I used a bought soya cream – though less than the recipe calls for. Everything else was vaguely similar but I used more chilli and more essence.

For myself, I could have done without the tomatoes in the dish. I don’t think they added anything and jarred with the other flavours. My brother and Matthew almost fought over the leftovers though, so it went down well there! I enjoyed it a lot and would make it again but I’ll make my own cream next time!