Trader Joe's Peanut And Crispy Noodle Salad Kit

See Trader Joe's own description of this new item here.

This salad kit absolutely lives up to the "crispy" part of its name. This isn't only because of the rice noodles (included in a separate bag, probably so that they don't absorb moisture from the veggies) and chopped peanuts (ditto). It's because the main components were unusually fresh and crisp. There was crunch in every bite.

Still, I wasn't thrilled. I definitely did not experience the simultaneous tastes of "sour, spicy, salty, and umami," as TJ's promises. Most of what pleasure there was from eating it was texture, not flavor. And for TJ's to claim that this is a Thai salad is an affront to Thai cuisine. 

I did like the included peanut-lime dressing, even if the lime was way too subdued (practically absent). I would buy that if they sold it separately. Nina, predictably, found it too sweet. 


Will I buy it again? 

No. 

Trader Joe's Leafy Greens With Butternut Squash Salad Kit

I was going to say that I found this product to be a mixed bag--but then I realized what a terrible unintentional pun that would be, and I couldn't do it. My policy on terrible puns is that they must be intentional.

Oddly, I liked all the accoutrements here, but not so much the main salad itself. The latter was too much lawn-clipping for me. The add-ins, though, were nice. I was surprised that I liked the slices of butternut squash, which I had anticipated would taste out of place.

The dressing--"white balsamic vinaigrette"--immediately struck me as much too sweet, but by my second serving of salad, I had grown rather fond of it. Trader Joe's bagged salad kits have had a not-great record with their included dressings, but this one is a winner. I wish they'd sell it separately.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I'll stick to my usual mix and dressings.

Trader Joe's Lemon Basil Pasta Salad

I found this to be perfectly pleasant, though it didn't spark joy. The bow-tie pasta was perfectly done. I liked the lemon slice to be squeezed on for an extra, final burst of lemon flavor. The green stuff is spinach, which was on the wilty side. There's Asiago cheese, which looks plentiful but is so mild in flavor that it's hard to notice. Finally, there's a few ingredients that are so sparse that one wonders why they're there at all. I'm looking at you, peas and zucchini.

As you can see, in the salad's native state, everything is segregated. You have to dump it all out into a larger bowl and stir, lest you end up with a clump of pasta here and a wad of spinach there.

I did like it as a side dish, but it boiled down to just lemon-flavored pasta with small bits of cheese, dressing, and spinach--not an ensemble in which the components had equal roles.

Nina was thoroughly unimpressed.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Gochujang Chop Salad Kit

You can easily see what you're getting by the prominent list of ingredients on the front of the bag.

The three things that make this somewhat unusual are the puffed brown rice bits (crunchy, like Rice Krispies), the sesame seeds, and the "Gochujang vinaigrette."

About the first two: They come in separate pouches. I dumped them into my big salad bowl with the main ingredients. This was a mistake. They're so small that they all plummet right to the bottom and stay there. The more you try to toss the salad, the more they tumble down to the bottom. If you were to add the salad dressing to the entire mixture, that would probably add enough stickiness to solve this problem, but then that creates problems of its own. I think the best solution is to keep those two ingredients in their separate pouches and add them to individual servings at the table.

About the dressing: It's soy sauce. OK, maybe it's technically not actually entirely soy sauce, but that was sure my general impression from tasting it. It's pretty potent.

I did finish off this bag, using the included dressing--but I can't say I enjoyed it much.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I will stick to my routine: One bag of either butter lettuce and radicchio or just plain butter lettuce, plus one bag of either Power to the Greens or  Herb Salad Mix (I wish I could still get the Spicy Spinach Blend or the Lemony Greens Blend or the Heirloom Red Spinach for this portion of the salad formula, but they all made brief appearances on TJ's shelves, then disappeared), plus half of a bag of shredded carrots. 

Trader Joe's Organic Spinach And Riced Cauliflower Salad

Trader Joe's seems determined to put cauliflower in everything. Within a few years, I fully expect to see TJ's stores stocked with cauliflower lollipops, cauliflower coffee, cauliflower bagels, freeze-dried cauliflower, and chocolate-covered cauliflower. And why not? People apparently make such products fly off the shelves. For the manufacturers, it's great to be able to use, instead of throw away, the cauliflower stems that are left over after they bag the more desirable florets.

Here, though, the finely chopped cauliflower plays second fiddle to the spinach. It's basically flavorless, adding nothing except a bit of crunch. Those bits tend to glom together, not disperse evenly.

The golden beets and almonds are so scarce as to be basically AWOL.

So what you're left with is basically a bag of spinach. It's perfectly decent spinach, but not very interesting. I, for one, want more from a salad than spinach.

After one bowl, I was kind of dreading the thought of eating my way through the rest of this. So Nina took it home and added it to a far more diverse salad that she was making to take to a potluck dinner with friends. It worked fine in that role.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Curry Cauliflower Quinoa Salad

You can figure out just about everything you need to know here from the name, ingredients, and photos. Nina and I both liked it--lots of flavors, lots of textures, moderately spicy, and overall quite different from anything we've had before. Serving size seems accurate; it fed both of us (as a side) for dinner, with leftover for my lunch the next day.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I eat lots of cauliflower plain, and don't feel a need to gussy it up like this. But if I ran into this at somebody else's house or at a potluck or something, I'd happily have more of it.

Trader Joe's Yellow Curry Chopped Salad

Let's list what you're getting here. In the main bag are chopped lettuce, red cabbage, and carrots, plus some naan "chips" (some of which were crunchy, and some of which were soft--a strange discrepancy). Then there are small plastic bags inside, one containing some cashews, one with a miserly portion of golden raisins, and one with the dressing--probably four times what you could possibly want for the amount of salad here.

So all of the yellow-curry-ness of this product is in the dressing. It's supposed to be a lime vinaigrette, but I couldn't attest to that, as I noticed not a speck of lime flavor. It does have a full compliment of traditional curry spices, though the overall effect did little to remind me of actual Indian curry dishes I've had.


Will I buy it again? 

No. It's unsatisfying, unconvincing, overly packaged, and a little weird.

Trader Joe's Tahini, Pepita & Apricot Slaw Kit

My record of liking Trader Joe's prepared salad kits is pretty low. Heck, it might even be zero. (I didn't go through the archives to check.) This is one of the more successful ones.

It has serious crunch to it, what with the raw carrot, cabbage, and broccoli-stalk shreds. In fact, it takes so much chewing that Nina said she was starting to feel distinctly "bovine" while eating it. (To the best of my knowledge, however, she did not regurgitate any of it for re-chewing later.)

I got very little flavor enhancement from either the pumpkin seeds or the apricot bits. I wish the latter had been a lot more prominent.

I was kinda meh about the tahini-orange dressing (too much tahini, not enough orange), but Nina thought it was one of the nicest kit dressings TJ's has put out.


Will I buy it again? 

No--but it's close. I was happy to finish off, by myself, the three servings that were left after Nina and I had the first two with a dinner. But I already eat a ton of brassica vegetables, and I like them better in other forms.

Trader Joe's ABC + K Slaw

Eating this slaw was the first occasion in my life in which I've been inclined to say, "There's not enough kale here."

Because of how it's packed, with the kale on top, it's easy to believe there's more of it than turns out to be so. In reality, you end up with a kind of gloppy mix of carrot shreds and beet shreds, with an occasion stray kale leaf, and some glops of apple. Nothing mixes together well.

That said, when I bought it I thought there was about a 75% chance that I'd hate it and not even finish one serving. I didn't hate it. In fact, I liked it better than Nina did, which I would have estimated had a 0.00000001% chance of being true. That doesn't mean that I loved it, but I didn't mind it--and I ate all of mine, while she quit about halfway through hers. I even went back and had two more servings of it over the next couple of days.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I think apples, beets, and carrots pretty much need to stay in their own lanes.

Trader Joe's Veggies & Greens Salad Kit

I was about to describe this, but you can just read on the front of the package what's in it. It's all chopped, mostly quite finely, so if you like big leaves and hunks of veggies in your salad, you're out of luck. (The leaves pictured on the package are a lie.)

The bag contains three small bags, in addition to the main contents. These contain the dressing, the pistachios, and the "dried pear crumbles."

Put together, it makes for a rather interesting salad. I've never had either dried pears or pistachios on a salad, let alone both at once. But it was too heavy in kale and Brussels sprouts for my taste. Nina, however, liked it a lot--except for the honey-ginger dressing, which, predictably, she found too sweet. I, predictably, thought that was the best part.


Will I buy it again? 

No, but I'm not sorry I tried it. I started this as a side salad for a dinner with Nina, and finished the bag on my own over the next few days. Which means that I didn't dislike it so much that I threw it out, or returned it to the store, or gave it to Nina to finish (all of which are things I routinely do when I hate a TJ's product).

Trader Joe's Romaine Salad

For the first time ever, my Trader Joe's was out of both versions of the butter lettuce I routinely buy as half of a salad mix. (The other half is the Lemony Greens Blend, Spicy Spinach Blend, Power to the Greens, or Herb Salad Mix.) So I picked this instead.

I've never liked Romaine lettuce as much as butter lettuce. If I'm going to have it, I'd rather it be part of a blend, as in the Baby Lettuce Mix. It's primarily that thick stalk running down the middle of each leaf that I dislike. And this bag was no different. It will do in a pinch, as in this week's big salad bowl, but it will never be my first choice.


Will I buy it again? 

Only if like circumstances repeat themselves.

Trader Joe's Living Butter Lettuce

I buy a lot of butter lettuce from TJ's, either by itself or in a blend with raddichio. But until last week, when I saw this new version, it never occurred to me that someday I might buy a head of it still in it own little piece of the earth.

This was a surprising find among the usual assortment of bagged, pre-made salads. After having recently also seen the hydroponically grown watercress, I wonder if this is the beginning of a whole line of food-still-in-dirt products from Trader Joe's.

Anyway, I cut the stem and cup of dirt and roots off, and chopped and washed the leaves. Then I mixed it with a bag of TJ's Spicy Spinach Blend and shredded carrots.

The result was, for me, indistinguishable from using the bagged, pre-cut, pre-washed butter lettuce. If I single out a lettuce leaf and eat it on its own, it does taste fresher and livelier. But (1) this could be a trick of the imagination, because that's what I'm expecting, and (2) since I never use it that way, I'm not sure that it matters.


Will I buy it again? 

No. It doesn't add enough value in terms of enjoyment to be worth the extra work.

Trader Joe's Kale & Cauliflower Curry Salad

For once, I forgot to take a photo of this product when I brought it home, so I swiped the above from Trader Joe's web site, here.

This stuff is not good. The cauliflower is OK, but the kale is tough and bitter. (I think I'm just going to have to accept that any kale in my life will have to be the "baby" variety; I have not been able to get into the regular variety, despite many attempts.) There are way too many wheat berries, which don't add much except for a little chewiness. There are a few golden raisins, for a nice touch of sweetness. The "curry" is pretty un-curry-like. I don't know what's going on with it, but it didn't taste like real curry to me. I couldn't work up the interest to explore the ingredients list to figure out what it was.

The whole thing just didn't work. I suppose I ate about 3/4 of my half of it; Nina ate less than 1/4 of hers.

For an opposing point of view, see this review from the "Eat at Joe's" blog, the author of which absolutely loved it.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Lemony Greens Blend

This is Day Two of New Products Week. 


This is an excellent salad blend. But lemony? I couldn't taste it. But I realized that if anything was going to be lemony, it must be the dock, because that was the only component I had never had before. So I figured out which leaves were the dock and nibbled on a couple of them separately. And wow--they really are lemony! Kind of amazing, actually. The effect is diluted by the presence of all the other greens (and salad dressing), but it's definitely real.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. I already have. It has become one of my regular purchases. My stock salad is a bag of lettuce or lettuce blend (Champs Elysees, butter lettuce/radicchio, or plain butter lettuce), plus a bag of one of the non-lettuce blends (herb salad mix, spicy spinach blend, Power to the Greens, or, now, this lemony greens blend). I also usually pour in half a bag of shredded carrots. That makes enough that I can have a large bowl of the resulting mix daily for a week (including my dinner with Nina).

Trader Joe's Shaved Brussels Sprouts

One of my favorite salads has become any of a number of primarily lettuce-based Trader Joe's bagged salads combined with a bag of TJ's Cruciferous Crunch Collection. However, the latter has big hunks of raw Brussels sprouts, which I don't mind, but Nina doesn't care for.

Today I was reaching for the CCC again when I spotted this sitting next to it. It's just Brussels sprouts--unlike the CCC, which also has kale, broccoli, green cabbage, and red cabbage. However, the sprouts are chopped much more finely. I thought that might make them go down better. So I grabbed it plus TJ's Organics Herb Salad Mix.

I thought the texture was a hit. The chopped sprouts added little bits of chewy-crunchiness throughout what is otherwise a uniformly soft salad. So a success on that point. However, it was too much of the Brussels sprouts taste. It dominated and made a not particularly pleasant clash with the herbs of the other salad bag.

What TJ's needs is the blend that is in the CCC, but with the sprouts component shaved down like this, instead of in the big chunks. That would be perfect. Are you listening, Trader Joe's?


Will I buy it again? 

No. It didn't solve my problem, just exchanged a texture problem for a taste problem.

Trader Joe's Tropical Mango Complete Salad Kit

This is OMG Day 21 of New Products Week, and Day 12 of Mangopalooza. 


The salad base here is acceptable, though I would prefer the lettuce:spinach ratio to be higher. (The exact contents apparently vary depending on what's available, so YMMV.)

Two extra packets are included. One has dried mango chunks, dried coconut flakes, and chopped cashews. The other has a salad dressing that the bag says is a "mango tamarind dressing." It's pretty decent.

Nothing about this is too mango-y or too sweet for a salad. At the same time, nothing about it is especially creative or desirable.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I didn't mind it in my first two servings, and I'll finish off the bag without complaint. But I just don't like it as much as any of my usual salad blends.

Trader Joe's Organic Spicy Spinach Blend

This is day five of New Products Week. 


This bagged salad is a brand-new thing at Trader Joe's. See the company's description of it here.

I like it. I mixed it with a bag of TJ's Organic Butter Lettuce and Raddichio, plus half a bag of TJ's shredded carrots. (Note: Review of the latter is pending. I tried to find my review of the former, and was surprised to discover that it doesn't exist, either published or in yet-to-be-published form. This is odd, because it's one of the products that I buy most regularly--almost a bag a week. How did I overlook it? But I'm not going to bother now, because it's identical to the regular Butter Lettuce and Raddichio, except organically sourced. I can't tell the difference, and for non-meat, non-dairy products, I really don't care about the difference between organic and non-organic. I grab whichever one I see first, or whichever looks fresher.) This is the same as my usual salad recipe, except with this new product taking the place of Organic Power to the Greens. Less often I combine the lettuce/raddichio and carrots with TJ's Organic Herb Salad Mix.

The result was a fine salad, with close to zero work. It's just as tasty as my usual blend, but even prettier, because this new product's ingredients have a wider variety of shades of green, so there's a lot more eye-pleasing color. The "spicy" part of the title is an overstatement. Sure, the mustard greens deliver a touch of zing, but not nearly as much as the herb salad blend. Really, you can't go wrong with any of the three, though I do think they all need to be combined 50/50 with a predominantly lettuce bag for maximum palatability. Maybe it's my mainstream Midwest upbringing, but to me it ain't a salad if lettuce isn't the main ingredient.


Will I buy it again? 

Yep. One trial has earned it a place in the regular line-up. I like the basic formula that I've evolved. I think I'm going to try to keep a regular rotation among this, the herb salad mix, and the Power to the Greens. I like them all about equally well, and I think that little bit of variety will be good for both my health and my interest in keeping a decent amount of greens in my diet.


Nina's View

This salad is Nina Approved. It is pretty and tasty.

Trader Joe's Les Salades du Midi: Champs Elysees

I've had this several times. I think the best way to describe it is that it's TJ's most basic, generic bagged salad--assuming you want something other than just lettuce. There's nothing interesting about it, but it's unlikely to contain anything that anybody in your family won't like. It's what I pick when I want something well-known and unadventurous.

There's a problem with this and other TJ's bagged salads: Sometimes they look fine in the store, but they're apparently on their last legs of freshness, and by the next day the contents are wilting and sad-looking. This happens even when I'm careful to look through the offerings and pick only the best-looking ones with the latest sell-by date on the package. This happens maybe one out of three or four times. My impression is that it happens somewhat more with TJ's than with similar products from other grocers, but I certainly can't claim to have tracked the phenomenon closely enough to have any good evidence for that impression. See here for the experience I had with TJ's "Organic Herb Salad Mix."


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. It's boring but predictable (with the caveat explained above).

Trader Joe's Organic Power To The Greens

Here's what Trader Joe's said about this product in an issue of the Fearless Flyer last year:

In a world, where some speak of super foods, and many whisper of wellness, only Trader Joe's has the power to change your life… one leaf at a time. Trader Joe's Organic Power to the Greens will make you better, stronger, faster, causing a rift in the time-space continuum that will give you eternal youth and the strength of a thousand men.* 

*Not really. We made that up. 

That's a lot to live up to. I have not yet noticed having gained the strength of a thousand men. Ten, maybe, but not a thousand.

However, this stuff does contribute to a nice salad. I didn't even try eating it alone, because the combination of spinach, kale, and chard, without dilution by more mild components like lettuce, I just knew would be like eating lawn clippings. I tossed it with a bag of TJ's butter lettuce and radicchio. Together they made a salad that was easy to eat, and had just enough of an edge of seriousness that it felt like I was being infused with at least a trickle of superpowers. It wasn't quite Popeye downing a can of spinach, but it was close enough--and I don't think I could do that anyway.

The bitterness from the kale and chard made the overall taste a little less easy to enjoy than when I mixed the same lettuce/radicchio base with TJ's baby spinach. But there was a lot more crunch and variety of textures and colors this way, and probably a better assortment of nutrients, too, though I didn't look into that.

Will I buy it again? 

Yes. I think this two-bag blend I concocted is an excellent salad. I think I might play with it further, adding this and that and the other thing, and see what happens.

Nina's View

The Catalina dressing is in the trash bin and Bob is tinkering with salad composition. My work here is done. \o/


Addendum 

In the months since the above was written, I have continued to buy a bag of this stuff almost every week. Combined with any one of a few different TJ's bags of lettuce, it is a salad combo that I nearly always have in my refrigerator. Highly recommended. 

Trader Joe's Broccoli & Kale Slaw

Stop the presses! Last week saw such a profusion of new and seasonal products that I had to relegate a whole week's worth of pre-written blog posts to a later date, in order to make room to tell you about the more urgent stuff. We have seven days of reviews of products that are brand new, only seasonally available, or both. For lack of a catchier moniker, let's call this NEW AND SEASONAL PRODUCTS WEEK. 


This is a brand-new product at Trader Joe's. See the company's description of it here.

The chopped broccoli was fine. The kale was fine. The dried cherries and blueberries added a nice bit of fruity sweetness to the mix. I don't much like almonds, so that component was a negative for me. The dressing was OK.

So I didn't actively dislike much of anything about this. Yet the whole left me unimpressed. I'm not sure I even have a coherent reason. It's just that I kept looking at it on my plate and not wanting to eat more of it. I finished a normal serving size, but more through a sense of resignation to it than liking of it.

Will I buy it again? 

No.

Nina's View

The dressing was dire.

The mix was okay.

The rest of it is in my fridge and will be served mixed with some tender greens to Bob when he comes to dinner tonight. With better dressing.