I eat!
My daughter loves Trader Joe’s Mandarin Orange Chicken, which she eats on rice, so I thought she might enjoy this Mandarin Style Orange Chicken Bowl as well, and save herself the trouble of having to heat up the chicken and the rice separately. Alas, she didn’t. She didn’t explain why she didn’t like it – but I’m noting it here so I know not to buy it for her again.
Safeway has these cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing on sale for $2.50 every few Fridays (regular $6), and I got them several weeks ago. They are very good – as long as you microwave them first. They are semi-freshly made, so they don’t have the annoying, metallic preservative taste of the ones that come in a can and you need to bake yourself. They are obviously not as good as home made ones, but they don’t require the work either.
I love cream cheese frosting, so I loved this, but it is ridiculously sweet, so I can’t eat more than a bite. Still, it’s a very good bite.
Every Friday, Safeway has a bunch of items for $5 – among them, a bakery item. They usually rotate among a half a dozen of choices, but I was happy to find a new item this week: cube cakes. These are large, 13 oz, square portions of tall layered cakes in several flavors. They usually sell for $8. Obviously, they are large enough to share.
My closest Safeway didn’t actually have any of these available on Friday, so I had to get them from the larger Safeway a few miles away. It was worth it. The Tuxedo Truffle Cube Cake, at least, was absolutely delicious. You’d be happy to get it as a dessert at any restaurant.
The cake included layers of moist white and chocolate (I think) cake, and chocolate and cream cheese mousses. The chocolate ganache layer on top was absolutely delicious, it tasted of a deep chocolate fudge, but the strong flavor was mellowed by the rest of the lawyers. The cake was lighter than it looked and just tasty.
My daughters love Madelines. I started getting them for them when they were very little and we’d stop at Zocalo coffeehouse for a snack and play. The little cookies/cakes were the ideal size for toddler and preschoolers and even elementary age kids. Plus being small, they weren’t too expensive.
For quite a while now, Safeway has been selling these overjoyed/Safeway Select madelines boxes, baked by Sugar Bowl Bakery. I buy them for my daughter when they go on sale for $5, which happens every few Fridays. She loves them. They taste very much like the ones she remembers from her childhood. They are like a dryer, denser sponge cake, hard enough to withstand dipping but soft enough to eat on their own. Flavor wise, they are better and much cheaper than the ones we got at Trader Joe’s.
I first tried almond croissants at the Berkeley store of the now defunct La Petit Boulangerie chain when I was in college. As a starving student, these were a special treat which I’d allow myself once in a great while, but I absolutely loved them. Since then, almond croissants have had a special place in my heart, though I seldom get them.
I came across these Almond Croissants at Trader Joe’s during a recentish trip and picked them up without much thought. When I finally went to make them, I realized that it wasn’t a simple endeavor. I had to let them defrost overnight and only then I could bake them. I was frustrated, so I took them out from the freezer and put them in the fridge and waited a couple of days before touching them. As I looked at the instructions more carefully, I realized that I had to actually let them rise at room temperature, on a pan, separated from each other, for nine hours before this baking process – which I did swearing I’d never buy these again. Alas, after making them, I changed my mind.
These croissants tastes exactly like the real thing. Maybe not as good as my memories of the ones from La Petit Boulangerie, but similar to other almond croissants I’ve had since. The dough was very light with a bit of a bready taste, but one that grew on me. The almond filling was very tasty. I’ll definitely get them again next time I go to Trader Joe’s.
Trader Joe’s reviews
Every time I go to Trader Joe’s, I pick up one desert to try, and in one of my trips it was the frozen Chocolate Lava cakes. It must be one of Trader Joe’s worst desserts. The cakes were dry, with very little chocolate flavor. On the plus side, I did save calories by not eating more than couple of bites. I made one first according to the instructions, and then a second one with less time, but both were failures.
They sell for $3.80 for 2 individual cakes.
Trader Joe’s Reviews
A few weeks ago, I decided to give Amazon Fresh a try and order groceries to be delivered at home. I was particularly interested in trying their house brands, to see how they measured against others. In general, I was disappointed – and this was particularly true with the Aplenty Gnocchi with Tomato & Mozzarella frozen entree.
Much has been written about how Amazon is trying to compete with Trader Joe’s by copying its most successful products – something which it does with products that third-party vendors sell through its site. This particular item, seems to be a knockoff of Trader Joe’s Gnocchi alla Sorrentina, which has been a favorite of mine for almost twenty years. Alas, it does not succeed.
Unlike Trader Joe’s gnocchi, this one comes with tomatoes instead of tomato sauce. This means that there isn’t enough moisture in the dish to help the gnocchi plump up and lighten. Instead, they are heavy and dense. Moreover, the tomatoes don’t do much to flavor the gnocchi, and neither does the cheese, which remains in clumps. The result is a heavy, not very tasty dish. I would not get it again.
It sells for $3.80, so it’s even about 20% more expensive than the gnocchi at Trader Joe’s.
I love Chicago deep dish pizza, so when I saw Gino’s East of Chicago Deep Dish Pizzas for sale at Safeway a few months ago, I got very excited and got two of them. I absolutely hated the plain cheese pizza. I thought it tasted only of a bad pasta sauce and couldn’t stand eating it. Thus I was very wary to cook and eat the supreme pizza. It sat at the bottom of my freezer for months. But it was occupying valuable freezer space and, having waited so long to do something with it, I didn’t feel good about giving it to someone else. So I baked it.
Imagine my surprise at finding that this pizza wasn’t bad. I won’t say that it was particularly good either. It didn’t have the overwhelming cheesiness of great Chicago style pizzas. But it was perfectly edible. The sauce, so offensive in the cheese pizza, could not compete with the flavors of the sausage, onions and green peppers, and thus could be ignored.
I still didn’t love it, so I don’t think I’d order it again, but I’m glad the pizza didn’t go to waste.
Trader Joe’s Rustic Apple Tarte is a smallish galette that tastes like apple pie. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The tarte crust was lighter, and more flavorful than your regular pie crust, and the apple filling was on point: the apples had some firmness, they weren’t overly sweet and the sliced nuts provided a good crunch. It also had sugar crystals which I love. In all, it was quite enjoyable though a little on the small side. I’d get it again.
I don’t think it was until I tried this Roasted Garlic & Pesto Pizza with Deep Fried Crust ($6) that I came to the realization that I don’t really like pesto. I always thought I did, though I could never quite get it right when I tried to make it, but I think it might be too bitter for my taste buds – at least at this stage in my life.
In all, I can’t say I enjoyed the pizza. In the areas without the pesto, it was pretty “blah”. It didn’t have much flavor – the lack of tomato sauce was really felt here. In the areas with the pesto, it was too bitter and salty. The one redeeming quality was the crust, which was pretty good – though not out of this world – particularly when dipped in honey mustard dressing .
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