Trader Joe's Natural Turkey Jerky and Trader Joe's Sugar Snap Peas

You know what kills me every time I try to do any sort of diet or focus or weight loss? Idle snacking, especially at my job. If I don't snack at all, there'll be too much of a rumbly in my tumbly at the end of the day where I'll just eat whatever all night long, especially after the wife goes to bed. If I need to snack but neglect to bring one, that's when the vending machine gets hit up, or even worse, I'll get something from the work cafe. Actual menu item there (and keep in mind I work for a company that makes cardiac defibrillators): fries with chili, sour cream and cheese. Fortunately I haven't gone that far, but other stuff there isn't much better.

So, I need some healthy snacks, and to be honest, for some of them, they need to be the type I can eat however much of and not feel guilty about. The appetite is a monster that needs some slow taming. Pretzels would be okay, but eat too much of them (like I easily can) and the calories wrack up. Eat too little (or what most people would call a "serving") and I'm still hungry. I've tried baby carrots, and they work great, except after eating a couple bags over the course of nearly a week, I discovered I must have hit some critical mass milestone, and my mouth began itching all crazy, and there were what I'll call "other effects" which weren't terribly pleasant, either. Apparently that's a common thing. So, off I went to TJ's one day before work to try and figure out another snack option or two.

First up: Trader Joe's Natural Turkey Jerky. Jerky's been recommended to me by a coworker or two as it's fairly lean and low in calories, and I've mooched off them for a couple bites here and there, especially when someone brought in some venison jerky last week. That was awesome, awesome stuff. Overall, I like jerky okay, but wasn't completely sold just due to the skyhigh sodium intake. The TJ's brand may be changing my mind. There's multiple varieties - turkey, beef, even salmon for one day when I'm brave enough - with some different flavorings, but for whatever reason I chose the base turkey model.

The bag cost $5.49, which is low-to mid-price range for a four ounce bag. It's actually pretty decent - the chunk sizes are pretty manageable, and while tough and chewy like a good jerky should be, it's not all stringy either. My teeth are grateful for that fact. For flavor, it's pretty subdued - mostly meaty with a slight sweet tang, and definitely not all salty. In fact, look at the nutritionals and compare them to, say, Target Market Pantry brand that's a staple in my office, and there's half the sodium. While that's still a lot, it's still a big difference for the better. It's a good bite to add some protein to help tide you over, and the flavor, while good, isn't something tempting enough to make me want to devour the bag. My coworker Melanie (AKA the jerky enabler) agrees after she snatched some bites away, giving it "about a four." Sounds right to me.

And while I'd love to have it otherwise, man cannot live on jerky alone. So a good raw veggie that would stay okay, munch and crunch, and not make my teeth seethe seemed like a good thing. So, I got a bag of Trader Joe's Sugar Snap Peas. How the heck can someone review a particularly branded bag of sugar snap peas, you may think. Well, easy. Look at the picture of the two sugar snap peas on a Post-It. The bigger one, in the middle, is from my Trader Joe's bag. It cost $2.99 for the 12 ounces, so that's equivalent to $4 a pound. That short, shrively guy closer to the top left corner? That's from the local grocery store that touts themselves as having the best produce, where I bought a small handful the night before for a whopping $7 ($7!!!) a pound.

Now, I've had my share of issues with TJ's produce, but in every regard, TJ's won this battle of competing snow peas. I showed Melanie, and she at least feigned surprise. The TJs peas were firmer, fresher, crisper, and bigger than any of the sad, little pathetic guys I wasted my money on from the other store. I also noticed there the very fresh, tasty looking two-pack of celery hearts ($2.79 there vs. $4 elsewhere) and from buying enough baby carrot bags, I know that TJ's is a good value and, at the very least, comparable quality. So, TJ's may have won back some of my produce buying business, at least until it's time for farmer's markets and home veggie gardens once more. C'mon, spring.

Little changes add up a lot. With a few small changes like munching on healthier work snacks, drinking more water, watching serving sizes, and opting for a bowl of cereal over the drive-thru for a snacking vice, I've lost a few pounds already this year. And yes, I know, exercise, which is why I'm kicking myself back into shape doing c25k.* But enough about me. What's your favorite healthy stuff at TJ's? I'm all ears, or rather eyes, so leave a comment below!

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Natural Turkey Jerky: 8 out of 10 Golden Spoons  
Bottom line: Trader Joe's Sugar Snap Peas: 9 out of 10 Golden Spoons 
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* Believe me, if you want a good exercise program to get yourself into shape, do c25k. I've done it already, a few years back, and am redoing it mostly to try and gain some speed while getting back into respectable 5k shape. If a fat, slow, flatfooted guy like me can run a 5k, so can you....and I once ran a 10k. Plenty of apps out there to help you out.

Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Flavor Natural Dog Treats

Everybody's favorite furry four-legged foodies are back! Alfred and Sadie just tried these peanut butter flavored treats and they're big fans. But at this point in their food reviewing career, they're not super picky.

We're pretty sure their final verdict would have been a perfect score, but Sonia and I had to dock a couple of pawprints since the cookie sizes are HUGE for little dogs. The box claims they're for "big & small" dogs, but I'm gonna go ahead and say that if your dogs are as small as ours, you'll probably wanna break up those cookies for Fido, unless he has a REALLY big mouth. They're shaped like bones, fire hydrants, shoes, squirrels, couches, and cars, because dogs LOVE biscuits shaped like things they enjoy chasing, chewing up, or peeing on.

But I'll stop rambling there...because I ramble some more in the video. Click here to read the dog treat ingredients list. Also check out Alfie and Sadie's review of TJ's Chicken Recipe Jerky Sticks.



Bottom line: 8 out of 10 Pawprints.

Trader Joe's Ruggedly Adventuresome Cowboy Bark

At last.

With a slight sigh, Cowboy Joe slumps down on the edge of his porch, his tired legs dangling over the edge. It's a good tired, the tired that means a good, hard day's work has been done, and done well, and now it's time for campfires and cheap beer or whatever it is that cowboys do on their downtime. It's well deserved, and if one were to need proof, just look at the bottom of his boots.

Or, more specifically, look at the mud there, caked on deep, like dark chocolate caught in the treads on the soles. It's thick and dried and crunchy, and carries little remnants from Cowboy Joe's day, and before he can go inside to wash up, he must scrape it off his boots. That makes Mrs. Cowboy Joe happy, and don't you dare make her otherwise.

Cowboy Joe takes a moment to look at what all that chocolatey mud collected. First, there's this toffee. Toffee. What a silly thing he had never heard of. When his slightly crazy mother-in-law asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he replied "Tobacco and coffee", well, she must have seen this "toffee" concoction and thought it was some swell combination of the two. Or course, it's not even close, and he isn't sure it's something a real cowboy would admit to eating (like salsa from New York City), but still, it tasted alright and was secretly upset when he dropped some trying to hide it quick from his cowboy friends. They never noticed, but it got all up on his boots.

Next, broken pretzels. That morning he had some fence-mendin' to do on Pretzel Prairie, named after all the pretzel plants there, of course. Fortunately there's enough pretzel rods and grids laying around to make a respectable fence there, but all these other plants just can't help but get all trampled underfoot there.

And then, Joe-Joe rocks, as he likes to call them. There was a stray calf that ran up Cookie Mountain, which Cowboy Joe called "Joe-Joe's mountain" when he was just a young whippersnapper. It smells faintly of offbrand semi-generic sandwich cookies (hence the name), which isn't a bad thing by any stretch. As he climbed, bits and chunks of the mountain rocks got trapped in the mud on his boots and stuck on deep, but he was able to rescue the calf and place her back in her safely fenced in pasture at Pretzel Prairie.

Then, there's the nuts. He never really knows how those get there, and they're too small to tell one from the other. It could be from the short siesta he took over at Peanut Pond, or maybe from when he had to wrestle his cowboy hat back from one of those darn almondolopes who took off with it. He's not really sure, but sometimes, things go a little, well, nuts around these parts, and he's just glad to keep it all under control. 

He ponders all this as he scrapes that dried up mud off his boots. The shards break off in different sized pieces, some big, some tiny, some just little specks, into a pile, and, as is his custom, when no one is sure to be looking, Cowboy reaches down, grabs a handful, and shoves it in his mouth. With some bites his teeth struggle to easily to chomp their way through, and it seems an odd custom, but he does this to know one thing: to know what his day tasted like.

Off in the distance, a dog barks. With a satisfied smile, Cowboy Joe echos back the refrain.

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If this story isn't true, I have no idea why Trader Joe's would name this "Cowboy Bark." My only other theory is they didn't want their other "cowboy product" to be a lone ranger. Just like the story above, the actual Cowboy Bark is kinda jumbled, nonsensical, and questionably good at best just because it's so....not well planned. There's potential, but just not as it is. There's nothing overly wrong nor overly right about it. Sandy agrees, giving it a "two...maybe three at best." She'll probably say the same about this review when she reads it. I'm not all that lassoed in by this, either, and for the nearly $4 for the small bag, there's plenty of other goodies I'd rather get at TJ's anyways.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Ruggedly Adventuresome Cowboy Bark: 5 out of 10 Golden Spoons