Not sure what happened here. Did we get a bad batch? Did our local Trader Joe's manager go around changing freshness dates like Apu at the Kwik-E-Mart?
Sonia and I both thought these were bland, dry, and way too hard. We followed the heating instructions exactly. We consumed them before their "sell by" date. We tried them plain, with soup, and with various other dips.
There was no discernible garlic flavor in Trader Joe's Garlic & Cheese Bread Sticks. The cheese was wanting both in quantity and taste. Even the bread itself fell utterly short of the delightfully soft and fluffy Cheddar Jalapeño Pull Apart Bread we looked at last week. The breadsticks were slightly more palatable when we first pulled them from the oven, but now that they need reheated a second time, there's simply no redeeming them.
There was no greasy residue on these sticks. Maybe that's what they needed. To both Sonia and me, they seemed like nothing more than unsalted cylindrical crackers. We're struggling to finish them. If you want breadsticks without jalapeños, we recommend buying the pull apart bread and simply removing the jalapeños, because Trader Joe's Garlic & Cheese Bread Sticks simply aren't worth the $3.49 we paid for them.
Two stars a piece from Sonia and me.
Bottom line: 4 out of 10.
I was just daydreaming about lemon-flavored foods and remembered that silly urban legend that some lady named her twin boys Lemonjello and Orangejello after what she was eating in the maternity ward of her hospital, shortly after giving birth. Then I was thinking, "Would I ever name my kid after food? After something lemon-flavored? After Trader Joe's Glazed Sweet Lemon Scones?"
Probably not. But if I did, I'd make it a little discreet. Like I'd name my kid Joseph Lemon Scone Rodgers. There's "Joseph" in there for Trader Joe. And then "Lemon Scone" would be his middle name(s). People would call him Joe L.S. and wonder what the "L.S." stood for.
But even cooler than naming your kid after lemon-flavored food would be to have a band called The Lemon Scones. "We are The Lemon Scones, and we're here to make you think about food and get hungry and stuff! One, two, three, four..." And all their tunes would be about breakfast. I think you could forge an entire career around songs about the most important meal of the day. Maybe they'd have a B-side or two about dessert...but I'm hearing mostly just breakfast ballads. Their first album would be called Breaking the Fast.
Trader Joe's Glazed Sweet Lemon Scones are indeed glazed, sweet, and lemon-flavored. Like nearly all lemon-flavored products from Trader Joe's or anywhere else, my biggest complaint is that it could still use more lemon flavor. These are pleasantly lemony, but the tartness of the lemon is easily overshadowed by the sugary sweetness of the glaze.
Still, they're a carborrific blast of sweet-tart lemon. I like them. I generally like anything that's lemontastic. I love them for breakfast, while a Brit might say they go best with a spot of afternoon tea. I can't go lower than four and a half stars. $4.49 for six kosher scones.
Sonia likes them, too, but maybe not as much as I do. She'll give Trader Joe's Glazed Sweet Lemon Scones three and a half out of five stars.
Bottom line: 8 out of 10.
