Dujardin Root Vegetable Fries

I found these veggie fries at Trader Joe's while Thanksgiving shopping. They seem like a very Trader Joe's sort of thing, though not branded as such. Perhaps they're on "audition," and will come back with a TJ's label if they sell well.

It's one of the rare frozen-to-oven items from TJ's that requires less time than the label says (28-30 minutes). Unfortunately, because of my previous experiences, I had just set the timer for the full 30 minutes, and didn't check along the way. I also missed, until it was too late, the last sentence in the cooking directions about flipping them over halfway through. Oops. The net result was that maybe 10% were burned past usability, another 20% were edible but more charred than one would really want, and nearly all of them showed signs of being cooked much more on one side than the other. My bad.

In spite of that, they were surprisingly good, though very bland--needed salt. (Or so I thought. Nina ate hers without, and never reached for the shaker.) But tasty. My hunch is that if you have kids who love to eat French fries, but won't eat standard veggies, this presentation would change their minds. You wouldn't even have to tell them they're not potatoes.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. I want to try it again at least once to get the preparation right. After that, who knows? But since I liked them even overdone, why wouldn't I like them done correctly?