The 5 Best Things In Our Trader Joe’s Cart This Week

Trader Joe’s is one of those places that’s undeniably one of the most unique and interesting places to get your grocery shopping done. They take seasonality to a whole other level, and there’s frankly no guarantee that what you came in for will even be on shelves. While that might be frustrating to some, at least it keeps it interesting. With how mundane grocery shopping can become, we’d have to say it’s something we actually appreciate about Trader Joe’s, as it forces us to eat more seasonally and keep trying new things.

Videos by Sporked

Now that it’s officially the beginning of fall, we unabashedly indulged in anything seasonal that we could get our hands on. Without further ado, these are the five things we couldn’t leave the store without, and what we thought about them.

Pesto Chicken Breast

This pesto marinated chicken is from the prepared meats section in Trader Joe’s, and we’ve somehow never tried this one before. Luckily for us, it was a smash hit. I mean sure, it is kind of hard to mess up pesto, but overall it’s just had a really lovely flavor that we’ll be certain to purchase it again. Plus, the way the chicken had been broken down was in pieces that were manageable to cook through without drying them out. And considering that this product is made of chicken breasts, that was something really important to us.

For a more autumnal depth of flavor, we grilled these breast pieces to steer a bit away from the fresh, vibrant flavor of pesto and give it some deeper tones through the char from the grill. The marinade could’ve used a touch more salt, but otherwise this is one of the best marinated meats we’ve tried from Trader Joe’s.

Rating:

9.5/10

Sporks

Chicken Sausage Ravioli

This ravioli was actually a recommendation to us from the seasonal Fearless Flyer that Trader Joe’s has just put out. It’s a new product, and as big fans of filled pastas as a method of switching up mundane dinners we were eager to try this one out. Unfortunately, it was a pretty mediocre store-bought ravioli. The chicken sausage was lacking taste, and it honestly kind of made the texture of the filling worse. Aside from the chicken sausage, the filling was pretty bland aside from the occasional pop flavor from a fennel seed. Plus, the ravioli themselves were definitely more prone to falling apart than we would’ve liked. We’re definitely going to skip out on repurchasing this one.

Rating:

6.5/10

Sporks

Sliced Apple Cinnamon Sourdough Bread

Trader Joe’s has really been on a roll with the fall-themed bread items that they’ve been releasing. We here at Sporked have slowly been making our way through the different loaves on offer when we came across this Apple Cinnamon Sourdough Bread. The texture of the sourdough itself was nice and chewy, and the cinnamon-apple flavor was nice but mild. Overall, this one really just didn’t wow us though. That said, we’ll still happily finish the loaf and doctor it up with some nice spreads to make it more intriguing.

Rating:

7.5/10

Sporks

Turkey Apple Cheddar Sandwich

This sandwich was overall quite satisfying. The mustard-y mayonnaise sauce on it was delightfully tangy and provided a nice complexity to the sandwich. And, the combination of the tender, moist turkey with the cheddar cheese and apple slices came together to create a very delicious autumnal bite. You actually get the flavor of apple in each bite, even though there isn’t much on the sandwich. Plus, apples and cheddar are just a guaranteed flavor success anyhow. Our only real complaint about the sandwich was just that there was too much bread. Had it been on a dinner slice of bread instead of such a thick multigrain roll, it would’ve been a much more lovely bite.

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

Leelanau Witches Brew

Despite our undying efforts to try and locate the viral apple pie and pumpkin spice wines at our local Trader Joe’s, we couldn’t find them in any location near us. What we could find though was an abundance of these Witches Brew bottles. And after reading the label, we had a better grasp of what to expect.

We knew going into it that this would be a very sweet wine, as if it had already been turned into a mulled wine with added sweetener and spices, and then rebottled. That ended up being exactly how it tasted, and it was a great version of that. But don’t go on buying this if you don’t like a sweet wine and aren’t expecting something mulled-wine adjacent from a glass of this. We served it up hot with some extra whole spices and orange slices, and it was a super convenient hack to a drink we’d be making this time of year anyways.

Rating:

8/10

Sporks