Trader Joe's Handsome Cut Potato Fries

These are pretty good fries--good potato flavor, good texture. Also a good bargain, at just $1.99.

As with most Trader Joe's frozen-to-oven products, the cook time is meaningfully underestimated. It says 17 minutes at 425 degrees. That wasn't enough the first time I tried them, so the second time I pushed it to 24, and that was about right (though a couple of the tiniest fries were burned past the point of edibility).


Will I buy it again? 

Yep.

Nina's View

I liked these well enough. The flavor was good, but the texture was a bit leathery and chewy, rather than crunchy and toothsome. I wonder whether they had thawed and been refrozen. They are certainly worth revisiting.

Trader Joe's Classic British Muffins

These are not as good as most other grocery-store English muffins I've had. There are a lot fewer holes into which toppings can sink--which I have always thought of as kind of the distinguishing feature of this genre--and it's much harder to cut them into halves cleanly.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Power Berry 100% Juice Blend

You know how I'm always ranting that Trader Joe's sells such an incredible variety of really bad juice (or, "juice") blends, and you shouldn't buy them because TJ's is also capable of making some really outstanding ones? Well, this is one of the latter.

Nothing in particular prompted me to try this, other than seeing it on the shelf and realizing that I had never noticed it before. I didn't know what to expect of it.

What you should expect--because I'm telling you--is that this is really, really good. It's thick, made mostly from purees rather than juices per se, and it's just chock-full of fruity goodness. It doesn't taste overly sweetened as so many of TJ's blends do.

It's not easy to pick out any single fruit constituent, but that's not surprising, given how many there are. And it's not grounds for a demerit here, as I think it is when there are fewer ingredients. When you're listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, you shouldn't be able to hear one voice over the others. So it is here.

This is a gem, hiding inconspicuously in a veritable sea of awful juice blends. You might want to seek it out.


Will I buy it again? 

I already have--I'm on my fourth jug of it as I write this. I've decided that it's even good enough to join my Top Ten list.

Trader Joe's Parmesan Crisps

I bought these because they appear so similar to the excellent Sun-Dried Tomato & Cheese Sourdough Toasts, which I love. As the saying goes, they're the same, but different: The bread isn't sourdough. There are no sun-dried tomatoes. There is less cheese.

These three points together make all the difference in the world. They're basically very slightly cheesy Melba toasts. In other words, they're kind of pointless. They do not need to exist.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Raspberry Fruit Spread

This is very pleasant stuff. And no wonder--the ingredients are just raspberries, grape juice concentrate as a sweetener, pectin, and ascorbic and citric acids.

Predictably, it works anywhere you might usually use raspberry jam. It tastes more natural, less sweet than jam.


Will I buy it again? 

Probably not. Part of that is because it's a lot more expensive than jam. That, at least, is defensible. The other part of the reason isn't, really: I'm a barbarian. I was raised on cheap fruit jam, and still like it. Though I could sense that this spread was how such a product ought to taste, I'm still so used to the stuff that's about half added sugar that that's what I want. I'm sorry.

Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Crisps

These are yummy little morsels of delight. They are just thin slices of dark chocolate with tiny embedded rice crisps. They're like Nestle's Crunch, but with dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate, and cut into thin, bent slices that resemble half-sized Pringles.

I can't think of anything more to tell you about them. But if that description isn't enough to let you decide whether you'd like them, I'm not sure what would.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes.

Roundup

This is my weekly compilation of news and other links related to Trader Joe's.


How to shop at Trader Joe's



Best tweets of the week:\

1.

And finally, here's this week's cute cat in a Trader Joe's grocery bag: