Trader Jacque's Fleur de Sel Caramel Sauce and Trader Joe's French Vanilla Ice Cream

I've been kinda waffling for the last little bit here, trying to decide if I should include the picture over to the right there. Between my complete and utter lack of any photographic talent whatsoever, and the fact that Sandy I own the world's worst ice cream scoop, and how inartfully I drizzle my ice cream toppings, and how I wanted to rave about my favorite summertime dessert ever just for it to turn out so...unPinteresty-looking, I kinda hate the picture. Perhaps it's just more evidence that I should let the wife make and photograph dessert more often. Since my photo leaves no great way to even guess what it is, it's grilled pineapple rings with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce - so easy I can make it, so tasty I highly recommend you all go make it right now. Your boss will understand, as long as you share.

We'll skip over the pineapple part here, mostly cuz we didn't get it at TJ's...I prefer fresh, wife prefers canned, TJ's was out, and it wasn't worth putting up an argument about (as my dad says, you can be happy or you can be right). As for what we did buy at TJ's..

First up, Trader Jacque's Fleur de Sel Caramel Sauce. Fleur de sel apparently literally translates as "flower of salt" which is some hoity-toity hand harvested sea salt from France. I read a Wikipedia article about it, and it really didn't shine any more light on the matter than that, so while this might be the Cadillac of sea salts, I wouldn't know any different. What I can tell you is, it makes one heckuva good caramel sauce. It's goopy and thick and rich and definitely full-flavored, while the sea salt just amps up the caramel flavor even more. I'm tempted to eat it by the spoonful, and in fact, I just might while the wifey isn't looking. I won't go out on much of a limb and say this is the some of (if not "the") best caramel sauce commercially available. Regular caramel sauce doesn't completely cut it (that squeeze bottle junk? Please.), and while there's always a place for dulce de leche, I just might have me a new favorite. Fantastic stuff, hands down.

Trader Joe's French Vanilla Ice Cream might be even better. I've always kinda regarded vanilla as a boring kind of flavor. I mean, it's just vanilla, right? For this ice cream, that's wrong. This is something tastier and fancier, like, I don't know, ~*VANILLA*~ or something. Except in a modest way, cuz vanilla still isn't all that flashy. Yet, I seriously do not know what it is, but like other Trader Joe's ice cream sent from above, we could nom all night on it just by itself, and it was even better for our pineapple/caramel dessert. It's just honest-to-good rich, creamy ice cream that for whatever reason struck my taste buds as being especially tasty and somehow more vibrant than any other vanilla ice cream that comes to mind. So good.

Sandy wasn't quite as enthusiastic going into dessert time as I was about this particular treat. She said some of it had to do with her having the caramel sauce before, and apparently it was a little too salty then for her taste. It wasn't this time around, she said, although the best she could muster up for the Fleur de Sel Caramel Sauce was just a lowly, stinkin', miserly three. You better believe I'm upping that for my score. For our second French inspiration, Sandy (as usual) was much more enthusiastic about the ice cream, going with a four. I'm going a smidge higher than that. Regardless of final scores, this was one darn good summery dessert that certainly tastes a lot better than how my feeble attempt to assemble and photograph it looks.

Bottom lines: Trader Jacque's Fleur de Sel Caramel Sauce: 8 out of 10 Golden Spoons
Trader Joe's French Vanilla Ice Cream: 8.5 of 10 Golden Spoons

Trader Joe's Honey Glazed Miso Salmon on Salad Greens

I'm beginning to grow skeptical of Trader Joe's salmon products. The best score we have so far on a TJ's salmon dish was a measly 6.5 stars out of 10. But our biggest complaint about the Mojito Salmon wasn't the salmon itself.

The Sockeye Salmon, however, was a different story. In this case, the salmon completely ruined a halfway decent bag of pasta and vegetables. With a few notable exceptions, we had a lot of comments and emails supporting our findings and opinions about that particular product. The salmon in that bag was just nasty.

Yet, brave adventurers that we are, the foodie-hack bloggers of WG@TJ's plow forth—with our tongue-in-cheek statements of self-aggrandizement held high, ingesting even the most risky of TJ's dishes, hoping that we, for the vicarious benefit of our readers, will discover something unique and tasty and worthy of our hard-earned dollars.

This dish, unfortunately, does not fall into that category.

I must admit that there is generally a huge range of differing experiences when it comes to Trader Joe's already-prepared, refrigerated meals, since the freshness factor can vary a bit, and the amount and quality of each ingredient used can also vary. But again, as in the case of the Sockeye Salmon, we have a meal with great veggies and pasta that is spoiled by a batch of highly-fishy salmon. The dressing was good, the lettuce was fresh, the lo mein was tasty, if maybe a bit too soggy. No major complaints, except for the salmon.

But unfortunately, the salmon is the centerpiece of the meal—or so one would think by looking at the label. I suppose in this case it was a saving grace that there wasn't very much salmon in the salad. What little salmon there was tasted like dirty socks—and yes, I know what dirty socks taste like...long story, don't wanna get into that now #childhoodtraumas.

I'm just going to go ahead and tell you to try it if you're desperate for a lo mein-topped salad with Asian-ish dressing. But be prepared to scoop out the salmon and serve it to a starving stray cat, who very well may pass on the offer.

2.5 out of 5 stars from me. The same from Sonia.

Bottom line: 5 out of 10 stars.

Trader Joe's Grass Fed Angus Beef

Given the virtual cornucopia of fake meat products we've reviewed, up to and including the challengingly named Beefless Ground Beef, it's only fair if we review some real actual meat every once in a while, lest you start believin' we're some sort of rogue vegetarians trying to clobber you into our way of living or something. That's not how we roll.

Truth be told, Sandy and I don't eat a lot of meat, particularly, and when we do it's usually chicken or fish, and not red meat so much. It was a pretty rare treat (more so for me) when I picked up a pack of steaks to grill up the other week in a last ditch effort to get her iron up before our kid makes his/her grand debut literally any day now. Other than that, other than the occasional dinner at a place like Burgatory or the sporadic cook out burger, beef just isn't one of our usual purchases for whatever reason.

So anyways, for the reason mentioned above, last trip we picked up Trader Joe's Grass Fed Angus Beef to slap on the grill for some burger lovin'. There's plenty of grass-fed vs. corn/grain-fed debates you can read elsewhere on the Interwebs, so I'm not really going to be delving into those here. Instead, as usual, I'll be focusing on taste. Tell ya what: it makes a darn good burger. I molded four good sized patties out of the one pound hunk we bought for $5.99. Sandy needs her burgers well done (or at least not one speck of pink in them), while I tend towards more of a medium, juicy burger. This beef gave us the best of both worlds. Our burgers, while cooked them all the way through and even a little charred on the outside, were still juicely dripping with every bite. And they tasted like good, solid, honest beef, too, with a nice beefy texture. In all, it worked well with the garlic salt and pepper I mixed in, and tasted great alongside the grilled green beans (slathered with chipotle olive oil and sprinkled with kosher salt) for a classic summer time dinner. Good stuff.

There's one thing kinda nagging me about it, although it isn't necessarily fair. Trader Joe's by in large does well by me, but I've gotten enough produce that spoils way too quickly from them to fully trust it (hence going to local farmer's markets for that) and more times than not, the milk we buy from them goes bad well before the date on it (hence us always getting our milk at Target). We haven't had that issue with meat from TJ's as much but....see the top right corner of the package? "KEEP FROZEN," it says. That suggests to me that perhaps this isn't the freshest of meats if you have to buy it frozen and keep it frozen. I'm pretty sure that's one of the TJ's keeps their prices low - buy food that's close to it's expiration date and sell it for a discounted cost. For the beef, that's not as much of a hang-up for us, but I know that can be for some out there. That does, though, put folks like my wife and I in a bind where we have to cook the whole thing at once even though it's way too big for one meal. We now have two burgers in the freezer waiting to be reheated. That may be handy within a couple weeks. I'm just glad that there's official word from TJ's about their complete lack of pink slime offerings, thus to me making it worth ponying up a lil' extra for some at least semi-reputable meat.

Anyways, I liked our beef-full beef. Sandy did, too. I won't be able to quote her directly, but she said something along the lines of "Oooh man it was good, it was just what a pregnant woman needed, a big ol' chunk of CARNE to bite into that was all juice-going-everywhere-and-down-my-arms and delicious and stuff." Umm, okay. She went ahead and gave "about a four," noting that while way above fast food standard, she's not enough of a beef connoisseur to tell this TJ in-carne-ation apart from the truly great stuff. I don't know, it's pretty decent, and I'd say it's in similar quality to the beef we had in our tacos at my brother and sister in law's tonight. They get their beef from some free range hippie cow-huggin' happy farm kinda place, I think. Something around a four works for me, too.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Grass Fed Angus Beef: 8 out of 10 Golden Spoons