Trader Joe's Cocoa Drizzled Kettle Corn

My beautiful, lovely wife Sandy, with whom I have just celebrated three years of married bliss, usually has a lot of really good ideas, but a somewhat enigmatic sense of timing with them. A recent, classic example of this is her recent push for us to join Weight Watchers. We're both packing a few extra pounds these days - she with the completely, 100% valid reason of shedding off a few more stubborn pounds after having our baby a few months back, and me with the not-as-completely, perhaps 50% valid reason of too many sympathy cheeseburgers along throughout the pregnancy. Now, I'm not opposed to joining Weight Watchers - I know it's done well for a lot of folks and hey, I could use the help - but really, talking about it the week leading up to Thanksgiving, with holiday parties and Christmas right around the corner? I mean, she knows what our moms are capable of around the holidays when the family's all together, and there's no way that's conducive to anything resembling a weight loss management plan. There's a reason why people wait until New Year's Day until to really start making a concerted effort about such things. Now, if she would have said, "Hey, let's start trying to watch what we eat, eat some stuff in moderation, mix in a salad every so often, blahblahblah" and then after Christmas drop in the bit about Weight Watchers, then there's a good chance I wouldn't consider the timing as odd.

Of course, perhaps it wouldn't strike me as odd at all if at the same time she wasn't downright adamant that we snag a bag of Trader Joe's Cocoa Drizzled Kettle Corn. Popcorn by itself is a perfectly healthy, tasty treat, and probably kettle corn isn't all that bad for you, either. And maybe even putting little chocolate stripies on kettle corn isn't the worst thing in the world, but it just seems a little, I don't know...the word "gratuitous" comes to mind. I don't think it's needed to have a little treat that's perfectly fine on it's own. At least, so I thought.

As it turns out...this is pretty darn tasty popcorn. Solely considering the "sans cocoa" portion of the kettle corn, it's pretty standard fare. It's got the right texture and the right crunch to it, with a little sweet and a little salt. There's not much to write home about it, though, which doesn't mean it's not good (because it certainly is), it just isn't amazing or even all that noteworthy. But drizzle on a little milk chocolate, and now we're talking. Unlike other salty choco-covered snackies at TJ's, there's not too much chocolate, so you can still taste the slightly salty sweetness of the popcorn while enjoying the Hershey-fied goodness. One thing about the chocolate, though, and this can be viewed as a plus or a minus: like a second degree burn or a broken-down Dalek, it's very sensitive to the touch. In just the few seconds to transfer each bit from bag to mouth via hand, the chocolate got melty enough to leave brown spotty residue all over our hands. The positive spin is, think of it as built-in portion control as grabbing it by the handful would create a mess. On the other hand, well, in the wrong hands there will be a mess to deal with. Judge as you will.

I forgot to ask Sandy how she would score this. If there's anything I've learned over the past fourish months, it's: Don't wake up the baby ever and don't wake up the mama until absolutely necessary. Asking her for her score doesn't make the cut, so I'll just have to guess it for her. Hmmm...well, despite our much-conversed about healthy eating aspirations, we both kinda housed the bag in two short sessions of watching Dr. Who (hence the Dalek reference) and I can tell we both enjoyed it roughly equally, except perhaps one of us more than the other, though I'm not sure which one of us that would be. Eh well. Split as you see fit.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Cocoa Drizzled Kettle Corn: 8.5 out of 10 Golden Spoons

Trader Joe's Pumpkin Greek Yogurt

This pumpkin-tastic season isn't over yet. So when Sonia heard the buzz about a "delicious" new kind of yogurt at TJ's via Instagram, she rushed out to get some for a review. She heard rave review after rave review as people posted pics of the product repeatedly. Pumpkin yogurt sounded weird to me, but I'll try almost anything once.

Sonia's facial expressions are frequently enigmatic and very difficult to translate, even after 3 years of marriage. And her reaction to this stuff was no different. She blankly stared into space and smacked her lips. The blankness slowly became a grimace. I tasted it myself. It struck me that this pumpkin yogurt wasn't as thick as most Greek yogurts, which, I must admit, I don't really like. I thought this "Greek" yogurt had the consistency of a normal yogurt instead. Sonia agreed, and added that although most Greek yogurts are low-fat, the fact that this Greek yogurt was non-fat might have contributed to its thinner-than-expected consistency. 

I'm not sure what facial expressions I usually make when I try stuff, but I'm pretty sure I grimaced just like Sonia. To me, it tasted like aspartame. There's no aspartame on the ingredients list, to be sure, but I still swear it tasted like it. Sonia said it was too sour. We checked to make sure it hadn't gone bad. There was a month left until the expiration date. There was very little flavor. It tasted vaguely of sourness, nutmeg, and cloves, all in a small tub of plain yogurt. 

After all the expectation, all the hype, we felt pretty let-down. Especially Sonia. And again, maybe our taste buds are just numb to pumpkin after too many seasonal treats (most of which were way too sweet for our own good), but we weren't feelin' this Pumpkin Greek Yogurt at all. So once again, it was Pumpkin Butter to the rescue. The sweetness of the pumpkin butter made the yogurt much more palatable, and we were able to finish the little tub fairly quickly after that. But we're really reviewing these products for themselves, not for how well they mix with other Trader Joe's products. All in all, we felt this Greek yogurt was a big fail. But there are plenty of dissenting opinions out there. Let us know what you think of it in a comment below. Thanks! And happy Thanksgiving to everyone! Argh, I feel like a terrible person for putting up a negative review on Thanksgiving Day. Forgive me.

1.5 out of 5 stars from Sonia. 2.5 stars from me.

Bottom line: 4 out of 10.