Author Archive
06/13/2018
June 13, 2018
You won’t have to journey to Thailand to find this, but you may have to wait 12 months – or at least until ALDI decides to have this special again. I don’t know how I missed it the first time, but I did find it marked down to $1.25, half price, the next week. Unfortunately when I got back to the store two days later, it was all gone.
This is very good. The slight sweetness of the coconut milk contrasts nicely with the spices and moderate heat of the other ingredients in the thin curry sauce. It’s a very good sauce approaching good restaurant quality. Floating in the sauce are big chunks of veggies and big noodles. The wide flat noodles are thicker and wider than a linguine noodle for comparison. The cooked noodles had a nice texture and were cooked just about to perfection. Among the veggies were baby corn, sugar snap peas, carrots and pieces of red bell pepper and mango. Normally I don’t like baby corn, but these were different. First, they were the size where they should be attending kindergarten. Second, they also were correctly cooked and had none of that starchy taste of the smaller baby corn.
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Tags:aldi, calories, food, nutrition, price, red curry, review, thai
Posted in ALDI, Recipes, food, cooking and related items | 5 Comments »
06/12/2018
June 12, 2018
Have you ever wanted to try a Starbucks double espresso? This coffee will come close to that experience. The only problem is, you may not find either a good thing.
There’s not much aroma coming from the package when first opened. The color of the beans is a little darker than the indicated medium roast. The beans also have more oil on them than might be expected from a medium roast. The beans vary in size. Some are rather large beans.
When brewed in a coffee press, the coffee was bitter and left a feeling of fine grit in the mouth. The fine grit thing was interesting, but unwelcomed. Even when brewed through a standard drip coffee maker filtered through a paper filter, that fine grit feeling was still there. It and the bitterness were reduced as the coffee cooled.
Overall, this tastes like a lesser coffee than just about all the other Trader Joe coffees reviewed here. If you’re a Starbucks double espresso person, you may like this. For the rest of us, it’s probably better to leave this on the shelf.
Price $8.99 for a 12 ounce bag
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Tags:coffee, east timor, food, medium roast, price, review, tj, tj's, trader joe's, whole bean
Posted in food, Recipes, food, cooking and related items, Trader Joe's | 4 Comments »
05/28/2018
Feel like you’re tied up in knots? Click here.
The original, twisted once.
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Tags:GIMP, monochrome, nik, photo manipulation, photography, photos, postaday, postaweek, twisted, weekly photo challenge
Posted in Photos | 3 Comments »
05/28/2018
I still feel guilty. That’s the same way I felt after reviewing the last reduced guilt pasta I tried. While this is okay, there are better alternatives in the TJ freezer case.
The sauce has a mild tomato flavor, but is otherwise bland. The shells are stuffed with 50/50 spinach/ricotta mixture . The mixture produces a nice flavor. The shells themselves feel mushy and overcooked. There’s a low sauce to shell ratio, meaning it would have been nicer to have some additional sauce. The sauce becomes rather thick because the sprinkled on cheese mixes in with the sauce.
The cooking directions seem strange. After a minute in the microwave you’re asked to remove the container and stir around the inside edges. In retrospect, I assume this was to prevent what happened. The sauce/cheese mixture in the corners overcooked bigly. This created some nicely burnt to really burnt bits of cheese and sauce in the corners. The nicely burnt pieces were enjoyable, depending on personal preference. The really burnt bits were not so enjoyable. One other item of note, a knife was needed to cut through the shells.
Overall this has; a nice filling, badly cooked shells, not enough of a bland sauce and a sauce that mixes too readily with the cheese sprinkled on top. And, you’ll probably feel just as guilty after trying these.
Calories 270 Price $2.69
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Tags:box lunch, calories, food, frozen box lunches, italian, nutrition, price, review, reviews, spinach cheese shells, tj, tj's, trader joe's
Posted in Recipes, food, cooking and related items, Trader Joe's | 6 Comments »
05/23/2018
May 23, 2018
Need a chocolate fix in the morning? This will get it done. This is an adult cereal. By that I mean it’s not sweet, even though the second ingredient on the label is milled cane sugar. The almond slivers and the few chocolate chunks in the cereal are inconsequential. Both are overwhelmed by the cocoa flavor. Cocoa powder is the 4th from last ingredient on the label. But it punches well above its weight in dominating the flavor. For this household that’s a good thing.
Nutritionally, like most breakfast cereals, there’s not much here. Even though not sweet to the taste, total carbohydrates are 38g per serving size. That’s equivalent to around 3+ slices of sandwich bread. Since rolled oats are the primary ingredient, there are 4g of fiber per serving.
The calorie count per listed serving size is 250. However if you visually fill the bowl your serving size is likely to be bigger. That’s because the “clusters” (if they can even be called clusters) here are very small. So if you want to keep your calorie count down to the number on the box, weigh this one or underfill your bowl compared to other cereals. Part of the small cluster size may be from the granola breaking apart during shipping. Regardless, be aware.
This was eaten dry, as a snack, and with almond milk. Both testers liked the cereal.
Price $2.99 -16 ounce box
Calories 250 per serving (55g)
(about 8 servings per box)
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Tags:calories, chocolate almond granola cereal, food, nutrition, price, review, tj, tj's, trader joe's
Posted in food, Recipes, food, cooking and related items, Trader Joe's | 8 Comments »
05/23/2018
May 23, 2018
This isn’t a bar burger. Whatever your opinion about bars, when they have burgers, those burgers are often some of the best at any restaurant. These, on the other hand, are a reasonably priced source of nutrients that taste okay.
There are a couple of odd things about this burger. First, the cooking instructions are for a frozen patty, whether skillet, grill or broiler. No microwave instructions are given. When cooked in a skillet, the frozen patty tended to raise in the center resulting in a nice ring of cooked patty around the edges and the center needing longer to cook through. I suppose putting a weight on the patty would be the way to correct this? Some of the cheese in the burger tended to melt and ooze out while cooking. I did not try the broiler or grill. Second, there was noticeable fibrous material in the patty. This affected the texture somewhat. While there is bacon added to the patty, it didn’t seem to add much to the flavor or texture.
There are more calories and fat in each patty compared to an equal portion of 80/20 ground beef. Both of those numbers may be due to the added cheese and bacon in the patty. Or there could be a higher percentage of fat in the beef.
While convenient and reasonably priced at $3.45 per pound (compared to ground beef alone), you’ll probably be able to build a better burger by starting with straight ground beef, adding a slice of cheese near the end of cooking and then adding a couple of slices of cooked bacon on top of that.
Calories 460 per patty (151g)
Price $6.89 per box of 6 patties (2 lbs. total – 908g)
Disclaimer:
This is an independent review of a product purchased from ALDI. The author(s) are customers of ALDI and have no business or other relationship with ALDI. If you have an issue with the product and desire to contact ALDI, either see your local store manager or use the ALDI customer contact URL immediately below to send a message to ALDI.
ALDI customer contact URL – https://www.aldi.us/en/contact-us/
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Tags:aldi, bacon cheddar, beef patties, black angus, calories, cattlemen's ranch, food, nutrition, price, review
Posted in ALDI, Recipes, food, cooking and related items, Vegetarian | 5 Comments »
05/19/2018
May 19, 2018
I’m not sure what makes these Asian, as opposed to just a nicely flavored veggie burger. I guess they had to pick a name because the box is too small to write “Just a nicely flavored veggie vegan burger.” Maybe I should follow that kind of thinking and change the name of this blog to “Asian.”
The flavor is a little sweet and a very little bit spicy. The burger firms up nicely in the microwave, not falling apart like others. A pet peeve I have with most veggie burgers is they’re generally on the thin side and are overwhelmed somewhat by a bun. Putting two burgers on a bun produces a better ratio. But I wish they’d make a single burger a little thicker/heavier so we don’t have to double up.
This seems to be another special item that’s only around a week. I don’t know when it will grace the freezer cases again. The product is labeled vegan and the ingredient label (not shown here) tends to agree with that designation. At $3.69 per box, this is priced higher than the regular vegan veggie burger at $2.49.
Calories 130 per burger
Price $3.69 per box of 4 veggie burgers (10 oz. total – 284g)
Disclaimer:
This is an independent review of a product purchased from ALDI. The author(s) are customers of ALDI and have no business or other relationship with ALDI. If you have an issue with the product and desire to contact ALDI, either see your local store manager or use the ALDI customer contact URL immediately below to send a message to ALDI.
ALDI customer contact URL – https://www.aldi.us/en/contact-us/
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Tags:aldi, asian, calories, earth grown, food, nutrition, price, review, vegan, vegetable burger, vegetarian, veggie burger
Posted in ALDI, Recipes, food, cooking and related items, Vegetarian | 9 Comments »
05/15/2018
There’s one more day to contact your senators and tell them you’d like to keep the old rules which promote net neutrality. In other words ask them to reject the new FCC rules. They have the power to do it.
The issue is simply, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to control how things get to you over the internet. Under the new rules, the ISPs can “throttle down”, slow, individual services which come to you. What are these services? Well they’re things like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, ESPN or even this blog. Why would they do this? Well the ISPs have plans to develop their own content and naturally just might want to provide you with better service for content they sell and slower service for their competitors. Or they might just not like what some people are saying and slow that down to yesterday.
You can do something about it by urging your senators to override the new FCC rules. There’s only one more senator needed in the Senate to start the process to overturn the new FCC rules.
Here are two links to help explain what’s going on and to help you get in touch with your senators. It’s pretty easy to do.
https://creativecommons.org/2018/05/09/red-alert-for-net-neutrality/
https://www.battleforthenet.com/redalert/?org=dp
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Tags:net neutrality
Posted in Politics, Religion, and other lost causes | Leave a Comment »
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