Text 5878, 68 rader
Skriven 2006-09-26 07:05:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: more tastes 307
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Little Debbie fudge rounds - nice soft-cookie texture but not
much flavor; these could have been raisin rounds or molasses
rounds for all the chocolate flavor they didn't have. A bit too
sweet. Not nasty, just disappointing.

I compared these with Trader Joe's Bites o' Brownie, which
offered a similar texture, a bit fudgier, less cakey, similar
sweetness, but a good solid cocoa kick. This allows me to
segue into a tasting of other TJ's products:

Chopped spinach (from frozen) looked as though it had been
run through a lawnmower; but it cooked up okay, with little
or no waste. A far better deal than fresh, although there
are, as one knows, times when fresh is necessary. In the
treatment I gave it - curried with TJ's Golden Elephant
yellow curry paste (a lot of onion, some curry spices, a
bit of hot pepper) - it acquitted itself well.

Lite Celtic Cheddar - disappointing, perhaps not for those
who eat Lite cheese. I found a dominant bitter milkiness, not
quite like the tang of a good Cheddar. Melting was not easy,
texture was sort of rubbery.

Freeze-dried tropical mangosteen - at first we hated these -
sort of styrofoamy in every way. After the first few, though,
some nuances came out - first I detected a flavor of Cheetos,
but then things improved (at least for Carol). Perhaps there
is a subtle hallucinogen. Anyway, if you let them sit on your
tongue, the styro texture gives way to a cotton-woolly one,
but a sweetness comes out that you don't notice if you just
crunch on them. The lovely acid balance and creamy texture
are of course gone.

Sliced yellow cling peach slices in white grape juice - just
say no! These nasty things were picked unripe and then drowned
in tasteless juice. No aroma, no sweetness. Texture horrid.

Caron's wedding brunch, catered by the middle daughter, who is
a busy doctor, was mostly from TJ's with a few things - various
kinds of cold cuts, mostly -that might have come from a real
deli, and a few tributes from non-family guests, including a
quite nice flan of which I had one bite so as to conserve pills.

Thai chili-lime peanuts - I found these utterly nasty. I found
that I could eat the soapy-tasting things (way too heavy on
the dried lemon grass) if I took a bite of hot chile pod with
each bite of peanut; I also found that the chile was much
better with the soy nuts, see below.

Roasted, salted soy nuts, which were what you'd expect. 
Pretty good with the chiles from the above.

Dried figs, slightly juicier than normal, otherwise average.

Fresh strawberries - I have no evidence that these actually
came from TJ's, but they looked just like the ones there.
They were, especially after being out in the California sun
again (most of the reception was out in cousin-in-law Carlos's
lovely back yard), superb, much better than what gets trucked
out east, no surprise.

Regular cashews - common sense finally prevailed, and these
were not the TJ's Thai chili-lime cashews or even the somewhat
better black pepper cashews, but the real thing.

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