Trader Joe’s Lemon Baton Wafer Cookies are special treat. If you are restricting sugar or calories, or simply watching your wallet, just one cookie provides such a burst of flavor – in addition to a satisfying crunch, to satisfy a craving for sweets. While the lemon flavor is very intense, it’s neither overly sweet or sour, just perfectly lemony.
They come in a very well sealed tube. At $2.30 for the tube, they’re pretty affordable – as long as you don’t eat them all in one sitting (which I’m proud to say, I didn’t).
I’m a huge fan of Ritz bits cheese crackers, so when I saw these Mini Cheese sandwich crackers at Trader Joe’s, I thought I’d give them a try.
They are OK. The cheese is a bit saltier and more bitter, with a somewhat unpleasant after taste.
They’re still quite addictive, however.
At $3.30 for the 7.5 oz box, they’re 1/3 cheaper than Ritz bits, which sell for at Safeway for $5.80 for the 8.8 oz box (so 44c/oz vs 66c/oz) – though last time I got them at Safeway they were on sale for under $2.
I discovered Trader Giotto’s Gnocchi al Gorgonzolatwenty years ago, when my oldest was a toddler. She loved them then and still loves now. And so do I.
Pasta often has problems surviving the freezing and heating up process, and Trader Joe’s solved this by freezing the pasta in little slices, which it then intermixes with the gnocchi. As they defrost, the melted sauce coats them.
This dish, as you can imagine, is on the heavy side, but the sauce is delicious. It doesn’t have a very strong Gorgonzola flavor – otherwise my kids wouldn’t like it – just enough to brighten the sauce. It’s ridiculously caloric, so something to eat only once in a while. It sells for $3.50
This Shark Tank product tastes just like graham crackers
Since I started watching re-runs of Shark Tank on YouTube, I’ve been intrigued with trying some of the products they’ve featured. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority does not seem to have made a commercial success and/or are not easily available.Oat Haus Granola Butter, however, is available at Target – and while it’s $8 price was steep, I figured I’d get both the pleasure of eating it and the pleasure of reviewing it. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be true.
I like granola, and while I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting, I thought this granola butter would taste like granola. Instead, it just tasted like graham crackers mixed with oil. I’m not a huge fan of graham crackers, so this product is just not for me.
Alas, my children didn’t like it either. While they like graham crackers more than I do, they did not like the chalky, gritty texture of this granola butter. I think someone noticed this as a minus in the show as well.
The granola butter is made with oats and sunflower oil, and while it has some sort of emulsifier, it doesn’t seem to work. The can comes with a thick layer of oil on the top that you have to mix in before consuming (unless you like eating oil). Unfortunately, you have to mix it in every time.
Unfortunately, but for the few minutes I spent writing this review, this was a total waste of money.
Birria, a Mexican dish of goat or beef marinated and stewed in a sauce made with vinegar, dried chilis, garlic and herbs, is having a moment here in the US. Quesabirria tacos, tortillas filled with birria and melted cheese, are suddenly all the rage and have been added to the menus of both Mexican restaurants and taquerias all over the place, while people try to recreate them at home. It’s thus no wonder that Trader Joe’s would come up with its own, frozen beef birria.
I tried it last week and I was unimpressed. The beef just lacked flavor.
The beef comes in large boneless pieces swimming in sauce. While you have to heat it in the plastic bowl it comes in (it’s frozen, after all), you do need to transfer it to a different plate to shred it. Obviously this is still less work that making your own birria, but I’d preferred if the meat was pre-shredded. That might also have helped it draw some of the flavor from the sauce. The sauce wasn’t super flavorful either, but a bit better than the bland beef.
Now, the beef does work well if you are going to add more flavorful elements to your tacos. I didn’t have any shredded cheese at hand – and I wasn’t about to chop anything – but I added some commercial sour cream and guacamole (not usual for birria tacos) and they were better.
The 16oz dish was $8, which doesn’t seem too bad, but I wouldn’t order it again.
Impretzively Fudged is another new Ben & Jerry’s flavor destined to not last for long. The creativity of their ice cream stuff seems to have long gone down the hill and they are now just simply mixing ingredients from their other flavors, not tasting them but hoping one will catch on by magic.
This flavor consists of chocolate ice cream with fudge-crusted pretzel pieces and a pretzel swirl. Basically, it’s a salty and crunchy chocolate ice cream. The chocolate flavor is too strong to let any of the mild pretzel flavor come through, but the pretzels and the pretzel swirl do contribute a light saltiness. I wasn’t a fan of it because I’m just not a fan of chocolate ice cream – but as a fan of salted caramel, I appreciated the salty flavor here as well. And I do like crunch in my ice cream, so that was a plus. Still, I do find chocolate ice cream boring and I won’t finish up the tub (not a bad thing)
Trader Giotto’s, aka Trader Joe’s, Fettuccine Alfredo is just that, fettuccine alfredo. It tastes like you expect fettuccine alfredo to taste. It’s not an espectacular fettuccine alfredo – it’s frozen, after all – but it does taste as close to home made as you can expect a frozen product to taste. It probably has as many calories as the home made kind, but I won’t look and confirm that.
I’m not a fan of thin crust pizza, but obviously carbs are bad for me so I could enjoy pizza more often if I could convince myself to go for the thin crust. California Pizza Kitchen might just convince me to do that.
I’d always liked California Pizza Kitchen, though I can’t remember going to an actual restaurant since my 22-yo was a baby. It’s not surprising, the only one in the East Bay is in Dublin, and if I’m going to go that way, I’m going to go to Zachary’s instead (and not for the thin pizza). Their frozen pizzas, however, are manufactured by Nestlé (a very problematic company). I didn’t realize that when I ordered this one, or that they also make DiGiorno and Tombstone pizzas). Hopefully I’ll remember and avoid them in the future.
These pizzas were on sale at Safeway last week for $6 (regular price is $10) and as we didn’t have particularly high temperatures forecast for this week, and I didn’t realize they were made by Nestlé, I decided to give them a try.
The BBQ chicken pizza tasted just like I remembered from long ao. I enjoyed the flavor combination of sweet (but not too sweet) BBQ sauce, chicken, red onions and cheese. The dough wasn’t too crispy, and it served the toppings well. Being so thin, it only required about 12 minutes in a pre-heated oven.
A pizza is large enough to serve 2 if you add a salad. At under 15-oz, it’s not a super great value, but probably better than filling yourself up with carbs. I’d get it again if it wasn’t made by Nestlé.
Trader Joe’s Spizzico di Pizza are frozen two-bite pizza rounds that you can be heated up in the oven or the microwave – and, presumably, the air fryer. They are pretty basic: dough, sauce and cheese but my younger daughter really liked them – even more than regular frozen pizza. I wouldn’t go that far, but they were tasty enough. The sauce was slightly bittersweet, the cheese had flavor and they were surprisingly crispy even when cooked in the microwave. I’ll buy them again, because my daughter liked them. She ate the whole 9 oz package for lunch, which included 12 pizza rounds. The package was $4.
The whole package had 670 calories, 75g carbs, 8g sugar and 1390mg sodium. They’re made in Canada.
Trader Joe’s does many things well, but cheese blintzes is not one of them. These little crepes are sold frozen and meant to be warmed in a skillet or an oven, though I used the air fryer instead – which worked pretty well.
The crepes themselves were slightly sweet, soft and elastic, and I liked them. The problem was the cheese filling. They use a combo of farmer’s cheese and cottage cheese which tastes fine, but has an annoying, gritty texture. Both my husband and I hated it. The cheese is lightly sweetened, so you don’t need to add anything to them, but this actually bothered my husband, who would have preferred them less sweet. We wouldn’t order them again.
The blintzes are around 6″ long, they have 105 calories each, with 16g of carbs and 6g of sugar, all added. The box of 6 blintzes sells for $4.50. The package doesn’t indicate where they’re made, so I assume it’s in the US.
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