Trader Joe's Ginger Snowball Cookies

Prepare ye the annual holiday cookie onslaught!

You know how it is. Every year around this time...cookies cookies cookies. Cookies here. Cookies there. As my five year old would gratuitously add, cookies in your underwear. Well, probably not there, but if you did, who am I to judge? We all need to get through our days somehow.

Cookies cookies cookies...so I didn't really need to buy Trader Joe's Ginger Snowball Cookies...but yet here we are.

There's not much reinventing of the wheel here. If you're thinking these look like fairly typical holidayesque pfeffernüsse, you're on the right track. Soft, crumbly, buttery, lots of excess powdered sugar to dry up your mouth and cough out and make a flurry fall on your sweater...yeah, these check all those marks.

As a redhead myself, the phrase used on the package though kinda makes me blush. "Studded with ginger," it says. I mean...well, I don't know what I mean. But you know what I mean.

What Trader Joe's means by that particular phrase is interspersed throughout the cookies are little bits of candied ginger. These ginger pebbles will either make or break the cookies for you. There's two things about them. First, the flavor is really particularly mild. Ginger can be really over the top or under the radar, and TJ's chose the latter here. I kinda like it, but I want more ginger taste. And second, for the unsuspecting, their presence really interrupts the bite path. It's not quite like biting into a rock, but the rest of the cookie is so soft and crumbly that hitting as hard spot kinda interfered with the whole experience. Instud of these "studs", as it were, I'd prefer the flavor to be amped up and disseminated throughout the dough, maybe like a triple ginger snap reimagined as pfeffernüsse.

So yeah. We have our annual cookie party coming up, and these will likely not be on the tray. It's not out of hate or spite, but well I spent five hours baking yesterday so I'd rather have the fruits of my efforts be on display. But when that's not a possibility, I'd consider buying again for the $3 or so. They're good enough I s'pose.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Ginger Snowball Cookies: 7 out of 10 Golden Spoons

Trader Joe's Cauliflower Gratin

After checking out an odd pasta plus cauliflower dish from Trader Joe's recently, numerous readers mentioned this particular pasta-free dish as an even lower carb, lower-calorie alternative. There are breadcrumbs in this cauliflower gratin, so it's neither completely carb-free nor gluten-free, but it does contain significantly fewer carbs and calories.

It's apparently only a seasonal dish, but it was still available on our last Trader Joe's run, thankfully. Sometimes I think "seasonal" at TJ's means "we get exactly one shipment a year, and if you miss out, just cross your fingers we'll get one more shipment next year about this time."

Anyway, we were curious to see how it would compare to the cauli and shells combo. Both dishes are refrigerated, not frozen, and they come with "best by" dates printed on the packages. I'd prefer them to be frozen so there's not a gun pointed at your head to eat them soon after purchase, but then I guess there's that whole "freshness" issue...

I digress.

There's plenty of flavor in Trader Joe's Cauliflower Gratin. There's a four cheese blend flaunting parmesan, asiago, fontina, and provolone. The cauliflower chunks are much larger in this dish, and I feel like they're slightly softer, but there's still a nice roasted quality to them, and they taste great alongside the copious cheese. The breadcrumbs were more plentiful here—another reason I enjoyed this gratin offering more than its predecessor. They're not panko this time—just regular wheat-based breadcrumbs with some herb flavoring.

Sonia raved about the taste and texture as she quickly downed her share of the dish. She was shocked at the conservative numbers on the nutrition facts at first glance, although if you pay attention, they're not as low as one might think initially. The recommended serving size of this product is half a cup, as compared with a whole cup on the cauli & pasta shell combo. They want us to eat half as much cauliflower gratin and somehow stretch a package to three and a half servings. Nope. Not gonna happen. This is two servings at best.

Both products are the same price: $4.99. In the end, this will get a thumbs up from both of us. We like it just a tad more than the very similar dish with pasta. The cheese combo and breadcrumb elements in the cauliflower gratin seem just slightly higher quality to me. Four stars apiece.

Bottom line: 8 out of 10.