Hot take: Trader Joe's Artichoke Bread Pudding has both the taste and texture that I wanted Trader Joe's Artichoke Timbales to have, but it's still not something I'd reach for regularly simply because I don't crave any kind of vegetable bread pudding very often.
It's a heavy comfort food full of bread and cheese, and it also flaunts the earthy, nutty, bittersweet taste of artichokes. It's kind of a weird concept to me, but it works. It's not desserty at all. It's got more of an appetizer vibe.
There's a surprising amount of cheese in each bite. When you take a forkful of the bread pudding, strings of yummy cheddar cheese appear between the bread crumbs and artichoke chunks. The breading has a faint sourdough flavor, but it's overshadowed by the cheese, spices, and veggies. It's also buttery and rich with notes of onion, garlic, and black pepper in the background.
This is another one that took a significantly longer time in the oven than the instructions indicated. After 20 minutes at 350° the bread pudding was still frozen in the middle. All told, I think it stayed on the center rack for 35 minutes before it was completely heated through.
$4.99 for the 3.5 serving loaf. Decent product, but again, I'm not really a vegetable bread pudding kinda guy. If I had guests that were mad about artichoke, I might repurchase just to share it with them. Otherwise, this is probably a thing that was neat to try just once. Three and a half stars from me. Four stars from the beautiful wifey for Trader Joe's Artichoke Bread Pudding.
Truth be told, I'm not really a sausage guy. I'll do an all beef sausage on occasion—or like in this case, chicken—but I'm very picky about both the taste and texture. If I can detect any kind of casing or skin on the sausage, I'll nope out pretty quickly.
Fortunately, there's nothing like that here. The ingredients are remarkably short and simple. They're called "breakfast sausages" but Sonia and I found them to be quite versatile. You can see in our picture we used them as a pizza topping.
There's just enough maple flavor that you don't have to guess at all what it is that's making them sweet, but the taste of maple isn't so overwhelming that you can't use the sausage as an ingredient in pizza, pasta, omelettes, or vegetable hash. There's not a lot in the way of traditional sausage seasonings, and that's one of the reasons I like these, although lovers of classic sausage might feel differently.
I mean, they're fine by themselves or as part of a typical breakfast platter. We just didn't consume them that way for the most part. We were surprised how much sausage was actually in the package. They lasted us a good long time. We always sliced them up into little discs before heating rather than having them hot dog style, which I think helped cook the meat more evenly.
$4.69 for a dozen mapley chicken sausages. Hormone and antibiotic free. All natural. Fully cooked. Three and a half stars from Sonia, four stars from me for Trader Joe's Maple Chicken Breakfast Sausage.
