Welcome to Shit From Trader Joe's!

Trader Joe's sells a lot of prepared foods and ready to eat meals, just like the army! Except these are for hippies too, not just jarheads. Unlike the true granola headz of the Left Coast, we never had trader joe's here in New YOrk City (aka "THE BIG APPLE") until last year, so like a Wolf-child I have a lot to learn about which of the foods are safe to eat.

Trader Joe's doesn't sell salisbury steak or some shit like LeanCuisine (more like "LameCuisine" if you ask me!) they favour things like "ancho-marinated lamb's ear". Also, there is some stuff Trader LeanCuisine Would read about that Trader Joe would be like "homey don't play dat":

"Hydrocolloids are branched or straight polysaccharide chains that may contain thousands to tens of thousands of monosaccharide units. These polysaccharide chains contain water-binding hydroxyl groups, and they may contain side groups such as esters and sulfates. They may possess a positive or negative charge."

All that fell magick ends up in the tum, my cabres.

The problem with it is that some of it is delicious and some of it tastes like a dessert at an indian restaurant. in spain.

So I'm using this page to keep track of the things as I try them. Also, I'm not going to try any of the stuff where the directions are like "heat this up for an hour." Excuse me Joe but if I wanted to wait an hour i'd order delivery.

Sorry I can't link to the food but trader joe's website makes the average band's myspace look useful.

sooo here is the list of things i've tried so far:

• Bean + Cheese Tamales
  • I'm writing about these first because they are so good and I'm still pissed they were out of them the last time I went there. The tamales taste almost like real tamales from a mexican restaurant, even heated up in the microwave, which only takes a minute. They are the best TJ thing I've had so far that's a whole food.
• Potato + Cheese Perogies
  • These are ok. They are hard to cook well. If you cook them poorly, they make a gooey potato slurry only a drunk version of yourself could love. If you cook them poorly, they taste nothing even remotely like pierogi but they taste ok. I throw some kind of sauce on them.
• Shitake Mushroom Udon Noodle Bowl
  • This is about 10% more tasty than regular ramen (don't be fooled by the pic on the box, there's like 1 tiny slice of a dehydrated back-to-the-future-II-style mushroom in there.) and about 200 times more expensive. If you felt like having a tiny bowl of ramen and chulo on it with some chives or some eggs or mochee or something, this would be an ok starting point if you wanted to get rid of a few extra bucks.
• Vegetarian Rice Bowl
  • Not as nasty as you think. I threw some rooster and soy sauce on it. Actually pretty edible. Not actually good though.
• Edamame
  • These are edamame
• Veg Potstickers or Gyoza (don't remember what they were called exactly)
  • To borrow a phrase from gifted writer Anthony Bourdain, I hate it like poison. This is amazing. The dumpling is the most beloved food in the world, every culture, even the non-culture of feral wolf-children has discovered that if you wrap basically anything in dough and give it a combo fry/steam, it tastes so good it almost justifies the retarded amount of monotonous work you have to go through to make the fuckers. How did you blow this Trader Joe? Or was it your nefarious East Asian consort, Trader Ming?
• Some type of noodles in a box
  • Some type of puke in a box
• Frozen Macaroni & Cheese
  • I made this in the microwave cause I was in a hurry. Idk about that idea. I will say it was marginally more tasty than say a Kraft, and maybe a hair more tasty than like an Annie's, but that might just be my preference for the elbow pasta talkin. If you made it in a oven completely diff story so who knows, but it takes like 20 minutes in the oven. I could make actual food in 20 minutes.
• Frozen Pizza 'Quattro Formaggi'
  • I don't actually remember the exact formaggi level on this pizza but it was a lot. Not that good, but pretty cheap.
• Thai Shrimp Curry Rice Bowl
  • I continue to be impressed with the fact that a bowl of frozen rice with ramen spices mixed in can taste not like Cab Floormat Soup. These are not awesome, but they cook in two minutes, are pretty cheap, and shockingly edible. Strong Buy rating on these and all the other rice bowls I've had.
• Penne alla Arrabiata
  • This is mind-blowing. This is "bean & cheese tamales" level stuff. There is some pretty ingenious science that goes into these things. It looks like what they do is make pasta sauce (out of actual food like tomatoes, not out of citric acid fruit substrate beta niner or something). Then, they freeze the pasta sauce, just like Grand-mama used to do back in the old country. Then they boil some pasta. Freeze it. The pasta sauce gets frozen into a big cylinder which they cut into quarter-inch slices. They mix that in a bag with the pasta. You melt it all in a pan. It tastes...I mean it tastes basically like pasta. It's a third-order simulacra. It's some sort of Baudrillard pasta. It's good. A++++++ WOULD EAT AGAIN.
• Gnocchi in a cheese sauce with something green
  • This was also super tasty. Shockingly so. I wish I had some now cause I am super hungry.
• Vegetable Quesadillas (frozen)
  • It takes longer to defrost and cook one of these than it does to make a quesadilla from scratch. This is basically like paying someone to put cheese in a tortilla and fold it in half. So you get a tasty mexican snack courtesy of our delicious neighbor to the south (and west) with a side order of self-disgust.
• Vegetable Quesadillas (not frozen)
  • Same story (minus the defrosting), but this one costs more money.
• Some kind of indian food called like rajj kolbani or puntup meentel or something
  • This was remarkably awesome. It's made in the traditional indian fashion: you drop a hermetically sealed foil packet into a pot of boiling water. Then you plop it out onto a plate. Very, very tasty for pre-prepared food. I have seriously had worse indian food in many indian restaurants than this.
• Naan with garlic
  • Pretty good. It's basically just like regular naan but its frozen, and its weirdly shaped, but you put it in the oven for a couple minutes and it tastes good. The most amazing thing I've discovered in the last year is that you can freeze insanely good bread for over a month and after you defrost it, you end up with pretty damn good bread. That's a big deal in New York cause there are not that many good bakeries and New York is big. At least not in north brooklyn or most of manhattan. apparently there are a lot in south brooklyn. 90% of the non-disgusting bread for sale in north bk comes from sullivan or amy's so you know its been sitting around for a while before you eat it. They should just sell it frozen. Anyway, this is not insanely good bread so wtf am i talking about anyway?

Hola SFTJ2 Readers.

I know its been a long time since I rapped at ya. PSYCHE. I just got back from TJ and I cooked up some of that penne. JESUS! That shit would shame more than one granny in out there. Little known fact about me, your host: my grandma once had a pasta 'n' red sauce recipe in the newspaper. I think she cribbed it from a betty crocker cookbook, but back in the 50s most Americans were illiterate so it was cool. You should be thankful for your blessings, reader. Anyway, i thought maybe I was remembering it too positively but its good. Its at least several notches better than like Mama Leone's Pasta Sauce And Corn Subsidy Byproducts In A Jar or whatever you're accustomed to. I'd say I've had worse pasta at $10/plate in restaurants, but that's not saying much because this country is fueled by disgusting pasta. Track/Swim Team Parties. 'People who run marathons'. Fundraisers at the firehouse. Maybe I should turn this thing into a blog.

Anyway, if I was you, right now I'd be thinking wait a second: there's no meat in any of this stuff. This guy is a vegetarian. Sure he thinks this crap is good, he probably eats carob donuts. Two things you're wrong about: I'm not a vegetarian, I'm just not getting down with TJ's (and others) 'meat'. It all started when I went into a muslim-owned deli and ordered a ham sandwich. Like that guy with the kalkabosh cart, the dude barked "No ham. Only turkey ham." So I said, "i'll have a salami sandwich." "No salami. Only beef salami." I got the turkey ham. It basically tasted like regular deli ham aka salty plastic. What kind of world are we living in where the ham that comes from turkeys and the ham that comes from pigs tastes the same? I'll tell you what: the kind where I'm not going to eat that shit any more. The second thing you're wrong about is that carob donuts actually taste about as good as regular 'dunkin' type donuts, at least the dense chocolate kind, the inexplicable donut that has a completely different texture and mass than every other ring donut in the shop. I wonder what carob is. I ate them cause I went on a roadtrip with a vegan and thats what he brought as roadtrip snacks. Never let the vegan buy the snacks. I also got some new items which I will be trying soon and posting in this space.

Trader Joes has gotta get their supply chain management on smash. Again with the no cheese tamales. Only one bag of Penne arabiata for sale. A lot of the most delicious items were sold out. Californians and other hippies: is this just the way it goes with TJ? If so that sucks.

(email me for the password to edit. sftj2wiki at google mail.)