Sweet Corn, Burrata and Basil Ravioli

This is a fancy review, because not only does it include a product review, not only does it also include a STORE LOCATION review, but it also includes a GUEST REVIEW!!!  One of my readers, who is also a friend, WARD, asked a looong time ago if I would consider a guest review from him and his wife.  I answered with a resounding YES, because he is a fun guy, a great writer, and because it would be something new and different for the blog!  A fresh point of view!!  

May I present Ward and Ann - the guest reviewers!

So here it is – let’s start with what Ward and Ann have to say about Trader Joe’s Sweet Corn, Burrata and Basil Ravioli:

“This is one of those meal items that has me saying, “It’s good, but it needs … something…” I am talking about Trader Joe’s Sweet Corn, Burrata & Basil Ravioli. The subtitle on the package says, “Creamy ricotta and burrata cheese ravioli filled with sweet corn and basil.”  It comes in a sealed, refrigerated eight-ounce plastic tray with two servings per container. It is not a gluten-free product, nor is it vegan, but it qualifies as vegetarian.

Here is the package

Ann loves ravioli and loves to impulse shop at TJ’s. So, this came into our kitchen, and I made the meal. The ingredient list is long, including mostly recognizable things like durum wheat, cheese, canola oil, sea salt, turmeric, cayenne powder, and microbial enzymes (which I believe are used in cheese-making as a vegetarian substitute for rennet.) At our Trader Joe’s in Rochester, NY, this ravioli package sells for $3.49.  (Editor’s note: Rochester, NY is where I met my sweetheart David!  And on our very first date we went to a grocery store, Wegman’s!  I wish I could say we went to Trader Joe’s, but I don’t think there was one in Rochester at the time, and besides, Wegman’s is a quintessentially Rochester experience…)

Before adding anything else to it, I sampled a plain cooked raviolo. (Yes, raviolo is the singular of ravioli!)  It was good, but not very exciting. The filling was mostly corn, and the corn was fairly coarse and unsweet. Maybe I am spoiled by having the luxury of choice when it comes to seasonal sweet corn in upstate New York. If we get corn that is not tender or sweet enough, it goes into the freezer for soups or stews. The corn in these ravioli would have barely met my soup standards. The cheese and basil part of the filling was fine, but there could have been more of it.

Pretty good price for this item

Now, about the pasta - the casing of these ravioli was rather fragile. As a result, a few of the ravioli spilled their guts in the cooking water (and I was very careful not to overcook – the package directions are clear about not boiling.) So, if this happens when you cook it, make sure you drain through a sieve or colander that will catch all the interior bits that have escaped into the cooking pot.

So, here are my secret magical additives to bring this dish from a 2.5 to a 4.5: greens, chickpeas and garlic. These are my basic go-to additives for many pasta dishes. Sauté some chopped greens like chard, spinach, or rabe until tender. Add minced garlic and cooked chickpeas (canned is okay, but I prefer cooking dry beans in a pressure cooker – less salt and more flavor.) When the veggies are tender, melt in plenty of butter (yes, real butter) and add red pepper flakes and salt to taste. The chickpeas will add a nutty and creamy protein factor. The greens will add a fresh garden goodness. And, well, garlic is garlic.

Ahhh, with Ward's magical enhancements it looks delightful, no?

Drain the ravioli (and whatever filling has spilled out) and add them to the skillet with the other ingredients. Toss and serve onto warmed plates (editor’s note:  warmed plates??  Remind me to eat dinner at Ann and Ward’s house next time we are in Rochester – fancy!) with grated parmesan to sprinkle on top. Ann suggests a wine pairing of Pinot Noir. Since we live near the Finger Lakes, we poured one from Ravines Winery.

Rating:  without Ward’s magical enhancements – 2.5

Rating:  with Ward’s magical enhancements – 4.5  "

And now let’s look at what David and I thought of Trader Joe’s Sweet Corn, Burrata & Basil Ravioli, shall we?   We served it with fresh basil (from our garden) and grated parmesan on top.  It will be interesting (to me anyway…) to see if our tastes are similar to Ann and Ward’s!

David: “These ravioli are very nice.  They are light, a little bland, but the cheese inside is a nice choice to give them some flavor.  I would personally prefer – I mean – the pasta itself is VERY tasty, so it is nice that the sauce doesn’t obfuscate that, but I like a little bit more taste, so I would recommend serving this with sprinkled bacon bits, or a tomato and sausage sauce.  Something that would bring a little more zing to the flavor palate.  But, that is not the ravioli’s job!  Their job is to be the best pasta ravioli they can be!  And since the ingredients are corn and a kind of bland cheese, I think it does a great job.  I give it a 4.0.”

David looks a bit unsure of this product before we tried it...  Aren't the stripes on the raviolis pretty?

And here is my take:  I am glad we added the fresh basil and parmesan, I think those were good with this dish.  The label said that the ravioli included basil, but I couldn’t taste that in it at all (and neither could David).  We served this with just olive oil for a “sauce”, and I think that is the only way to go with it, because the taste is so mild that any other sauce would overpower the ravioli. 

The corn is chunks of corn, which I thought was nice.  This pasta has the problem that other TJ’s raviolis have – how do you safely get them OUT of the pot after they are cooked?   You really need a large slotted spoon to gently remove them, and when we had these we were not in a kitchen that was stocked with one of those.

Overall, I like the taste of these.  I agree with David’s score of 4.0.

Look - we are visiting YET ANOTHER Trader Joe's! 
I think this brings the total to around 33 locations visited in 12 states so far.

And finally, a note about a new to us Trader Joe’s location – the store on West Sand Lake Rd in Orlando:  This was a very nice store.  It was clean, well lit, and well laid out.  The employees were friendly (although none offered to help us).  I did not notice anything really unique about the store, but they did have some cool flamingos at the check-outs.  I asked if those are always up and they said that they had put them up months earlier and just left them, because customers liked them.  😊

Flamingos make anything look more "Florida", even check-out lanes

Orlando Trader Joe's signage

Here is a recap of ravioli scores:

Price:  $3.49

Rating: (average of 6 raters, since Ann and Ward rated it using 2 different cooking techniques) 3.75

Baked Figs with Bacon, Cheese, and Roasted Nuts - MAKE THIS!

This is NOT a recipe blog.  I think that is quite apparent in that, of the 445 entries I have written here, there are only a couple of recipes that appear…  But guys, I have one that I have to share!  You are going to thank me for it (if you make the dish that is).

  

The baked FIGS in the foreground is what you need to make!

But first, a little bit of background.

I like to call David and I “Urban Farmers”.  We live in an urban area, but have a coveted corner lot, meaning YARD SPACE!!  We choose to fill that yard space with STUFF TO EAT – that is, growing fruit and veggies.  We grow these items at our Virginia home:

·         Pears

Pear "in the wild" on our tree!

      ·         Peaches (on a tree named Peachy, naturally!)

Sometimes it is temping to eat peaches right off the tree, but it is best to wait until they are full grown and ripe...

·         Blueberries (this is not true anymore, because we let the bushes get taken over by weeds and strangled, but we WILL grow blueberries again, I swear…)

Don't tell the neighbors, but one year I picked the 1st blueberries of the season on my
birthday before I even had a shower and got dressed!

·         Strawberries (in an old pallet I turned into a strawberry patch!)

This was taken the first year I put in the "strawberry pallet garden" - it is more lush now

·         Figs (on a tree given to us by a stranger who came to our yard sale one year and complimented our peach tree, then went home and came back with the gift of a small fig tree he grew!  We have named it Pudding and it is thriving in our yard!)

PUDDING!  She is loaded with figs this year.  They turn brown when they are ripe.

·         Tomatoes

This is the tomato we had for dinner the night we made the fig recipe, deeelicious

·         Eggplant (pretty striped ones this year, from a plant gifted to us by a kind neighbor)

Produce from the garden, including an eggplant, from last year.  I don't have a
picture of the pretty striped one yet!

·         Hot Peppers

·         Green peppers

·         Lettuce

·         Basil (which did not make it this year…  We were not in town to tend the garden, and the automatic watering system we set up took care of a great crop of WEEDS where it should have been nurturing basil…)

Our annual PESTO MAKING DAY a few years ago - loads and loads of basil!  

·         Parsley (which, sadly, suffered the same fate as the aforementioned basil)

And at our “get-away” beach house in Florida, we grow:

·         Myer Lemons*

·         Persian Limes*

·         Tangerines*

·         Honeybells*

·         Grapefruit*

Farmer Dave with TRIXIE, the magical fruit cocktail tree

·         Papaya (The tree, named Shania, was grown from a SEED!  Our neighbor Carol sprouted several and gave us one.  It has grown really well, but sadly, hers all died…  Awkward…)

Farmer Dave with Shania

Papayas on the tree

·         Bananas (these are actually on a tree that is between our house and our neighbor’s.  We didn’t plant it, but I am not sure they did either…  It maybe just magically sprung up.  And the house is  rental, and just got rehabbed and flipped, so let’s face it, whoever ends up renting it is not gonna know if those bananas are theirs or ours, so I think it is fair that we try and eat a few, don’t you?)

Don't bananas on the tree look BIZARRE??

*All the tropical fruits listed above with an *ASTERISK* grow on ONE TREE – a magical tree we have named Trixie the Fruit Cocktail Tree!  She is a “hybrid”, growers grafted branches of different fruit trees onto one trunk.  The end results is, voila, TRIXIE!!!

The reason I have given you all of this background on our “farms” comes down to this:  FOOD TASTES BETTER WHEN YOU GROW IT YOURSELF!!!  No lie.  That’s not “fake news”, it is true, man!!!  An heirloom tomato picked, washed, sliced, and gobbled up is the best part of summer really.

So now that we are back in Virginia and settling back into “real life”, we are reaping what we sowed.  And boy is it yummy!!!  So, for dinner the other night, we cooked:  couscous (we did not grow this…) topped with mushrooms and garlic (we also did not grow those), eggplant (from the garden, sliced and cooked in the George Foreman grill), an amazing tomato (from the garden of course) sliced and served with salt, baby broccoli (broccolini) (from Trader Joe’s – reviewed here: Baby Broccoli Review and cooked with olive oil, juice from a Meyer Lemon from our tree, and TJ's Umami Sauce (not yet reviewed) ) and an AMAZING FIG RECIPE David found online!  And that finally brings me to the point of this piece:  YOU NEED TO MAKE THIS RECIPE!

Our dinner plate - the figs were the STARS!

David found the recipe on a website called whiteonricecouple.com. 

Baked Figs with Bacon, Blue Cheese, Roasted Nuts

Serves 4   Total time 30 minutes

Ingredients:

·         About 8 fresh figs, cut lengthwise in half (ours were from our fig tree, of course!)

·         4 slices cooked bacon, cut into small pieces (3 slices was enough for us, and we used the world’s most amazing bacon, from TJ’s of course, reviewed here: Black Forest Ham Review  )

·         3 – 4 ounces blue cheese or goat cheese, softened and crumbled (we used our favorite feta we have found outside of Greece, TJ’s feta in brine, reviewed here:  Feta in Brine Review )

·         2 Tablespoons finely chopped roasted nuts (pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts, etc) (we used some amazing praline pecan bit we scored at “Peach World” in Georgia recently)

·         2 Tablespoons honey

Directions:

·         Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.  Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

·         Place cut figs on the lined sheet pan.  If any of the figs do not sit level, make a small flat cut across the bottom of the fit so that it sits flat when you add the toppings. 

·         Top the figs with the crumbled cheese and bacon.  Press the nuts into the cheese to help keep them from falling off.  (Note from Chef David – also try pressing the BACON into the cheese to keep it from falling off.)

·         Bake the figs for 10 -15 minutes or until they are soft, or to your desired texture, and the cheese is melted.  After removing from the oven, drizzle with honey.

·         Enjoy the figs warm or at room temperature.  Serve as an appetizer or spread them on toasted bread.  Serve with your favorite glass of wine (we served them with a lovely Trader Joe’s white wine, Monique (not yet reviewed).

You guys – MAKE THIS.  It is fast and simple, but amazing!!  So delicious!!!  It tastes (and looks) like something you would pay $40 for at some fancy schmancy restaurant, only you make it in your own kitchen and then watch crap reality tv while eating it!!  Perfect!

Enjoy these last few days of summer.  The seasons are changing far too quickly for my liking, but I will keep eating garden tomatoes and pretending it is still summer for as long as I can. 

TO SUMMER!!!

Day 219 - Spaghetti (Spiga di Pugua)

Did someone say “spaghetti”??  If there was EVER a staple food that should always be in a cupboard, it would be spaghetti (or some other shape of pasta).  You can boil up some water, heat up some sauce, and have dinner on your plate in minutes! 

We make PESTO out of the basil in our garden at the end of every summer and freeze tons of it.  Then we can just unfreeze a packet and put it on pasta whenever we want something super tasty!!  So even in the middle of winter, our garden is bringing us love.  J

Pesto making 2011

Can you say "PESTO PARTY"??

 Anyway, this review is not about our pesto (which would OF COURSE get 5 stars…) it is about this TJ’s spaghetti.  It is GOOD!  At only .99 cents I also think it is a bargain.  It cooked up perfectly and was a good base for our recent garden creation:  this spaghetti, a bit of extra virgin olive oil, garlic, green and red peppers from the garden, garden tomatoes, and garden basil – served with a side of grilled egg plant straight out of the garden!!!  It takes a hearty pasta to stand up to all that garden goodness, and this one did it!!

This is the BEFORE photo of what went on our pasta...

TADA - the AFTER!!!  There is pasta under that pile of produce, trust me...

The only suggestion I have is that somehow pasta makers get better packaging.  We cannot be the only 2 person family in this country that does not use a whole bag of pasta for one meal…  Once it is opened it is kind of hard to store in the cupboard.  I do not worry about it going stale (since it is a dried product) but I put this bag back a tiny bit incorrectly in the cupboard and the next thing  you know PASTA seemed to be falling from the sky onto my head, the counter, and the floor!  It is raining dried pasta!!!!  If the bag had a little Ziploc type closure on it that could be prevented.  Something to consider, corporate office.

See - only .99 cents!

Good pasta.  Good price.  Get it.

Price - .99

Rating – 4.25

Day 188 - Shrimp Springrolls

First off, these would be best to eat on a PLATE and not right out of the container, because they are messy.  And note – the container is hard to open.  We picked them up at the Trader Joe’s at One Pacific Place in Omaha and proceeded to eat them VERY CAREFULLY in the car we had borrowed to tool around town, a brand new vehicle that we did NOT want to drip peanut sauce on.

Speaking of peanut sauce, it comes with the spring rolls and is very nice.  Peanuty!  The shrimp are also very good.  The package says the whole container is one serving, but we split it in two and it was just right.  The cabbage and carrots are gently crunchy, which was a good contrast to the rest of the ingredients.  The spearmint was the best part! 

As a sign language interpreter, I cannot have painted nails when I work.  This photo makes it obvious that we bought this product on a day when I was OFF WORK!  Blue nails!!!

One idea – they could have used a bit of basil.  That would have made the flavor a little more complex and interesting I think.

These things make a nice lunch.  They are not your normal sandwich or microwave meal, which is cool.  But, like I mentioned at the top of the review, they are MESSY.  Make sure you have napkins handy!

A little bit pricey, but tasty

At $4.49, they seem a wee bit overpriced for what you get.  But then again, it WAS fresh shrimp, and I did buy them in Omaha, where fresh shrimp are not easily available…  I say cut .50 cents off the price tag and it would be better.

Yeah - shrimp in the heart of the Midwest :) !

Price – $4.49

Rating – 3.75

Day 184 - 21 Seasoning Salute

Not gonna lie, I bought this seasoning blend only because of its NAME.  21 Seasoning Salute – could there BE a cuter name for a spice??? 

SUPER CHEAP AND REALLY TASTY!  You should totally get some.

We do not usually buy herb/spice BLENDS.  The only blend we ever use is a Montreal Steak Blend that my parents gave us approximately a dozen years ago – a huge tub of it that has slowly been used and has taken up prime real estate in our cupboard since it was purchased at Costco or Sam’s or whatever big box store they got it at. 

Years ago David made me an amazing spice rack.  It is wooden and there are slots to hold glass test tubes, each one filled with a spice.  I would show you a photo here but we are not home right now to snap one, so you will have to imagine it.  Anyway, that spice rack has never had 21 Seasoning Salute in it, but when we get back home it will!!

So far we have tried this spice blend on zucchini (good!) and chicken (also very good!).  I think it would be a safe bet to shake onto most anything (well, not, like, coconut cupcakes, cuz that would just be gross, but most SAVORY items would be happy to be sprinkled with it!).  The label tells us “It’s hard to believe that this much flavor comes from a salt-free blend” and I would have to agree!  In fact, I didn’t know it was missing salt until I read that.

This is what it looked like on our cooking chicken bits.

Here is what is has:  onion, spices (black pepper, celery seed, cayenne pepper, parsley, basil, marjoram, bay leaf, oregano, thyme, savory, rosemary, cumin, mustard, coriander), garlic, carrot, orange peel, tomato granules, lemon juice powder, oil of lemon, citric acid.  Hey – now that I count that up that are 22!  But it is called 21 Seasoning Salute…  Are they perhaps not counting the citric acid?  Or maybe counting the two lemon bits as one entry?  

However they count it, this is a good product.  I am guessing we will go through it much faster than the steak seasoning J.  And this is CHEAP, cheap, cheap compared to any spice/seasoning at any other grocery store.  Get a bottle and try it.  

Price – $1.99

Rating – 5

Day 166 - Marinated Celigene Mozzarella Cheese

We recently were at a NEW TO US Trader Joe’s (in Fairfax, VA, a very nice store!).  

Hey!  Fairfax, VA Trader Joe's!

While there we decided to pick up supplies to make a tasty summer appetizer that we had recently at a TJ’s in Florida – tiny tomatoes with mozzarella on them!  We already had balsamic at home (Trader Joe’s, of course, to be reviewed later in this blog), and we hoped the basil we planted would be big enough for us to cut a bit off to top the dish off.   This is the mozzarella we chose:

Marinated Celigene (or is it Ciliegine?) Mozzarella Cheese

Now, there have been two previous mozzarella cheeses reviewed in this blog – one was our our regular one “the chub” reviewed on day 17 (4 stars).  The other one was one that we tried for our big TJ’s dinner party, reviewed on day 125 (which I personally gave a total of 1.75 stars to, but because it was a dinner party review I had to factor in reviews of the other guests and begrudgingly use the average of all reviews which brought it up to a 3…).  Normally we serve mozzarella over TJ’s kumatoes (reviewed on day 5 – 4 stars), and in the summer we serve it over tomatoes we grown in the garden.  But this time our home grown tomatoes were not ready to be eaten yet, and the taste test we did in Florida using the cherry tomato variety was yummy, so we went with what we saw – Marzano Tomatoes (sorry to be so confusing – I will review those small tomatoes soon!).

In any event, this review is about the tiny mozzarella balls!  First off, my partner David is the one who prepared this dish and he reports the container was very, very hard to open.  The size of the balls is good – he is quite obsessive so he cut some in thirds and some in fourths, but I reckon if you wanted to you could simply cut them down the middle and call it a day.  The sign said the cheese is marinating in “salted water” but David swears, “There’s somethin’ oily going on…”.  (The label of the actual product lists canola and Extra Virgin Olive Oil…  Maybe the signage at TJ’s was wrong?  When I look at the photos now I see that the SIGN spelled the cheese Ciliegine and the package spells it Celigene…  Maybe the incorrect sign was placed above these containers but we did not see any other containers nearby?  Who knows…)

The taste is pretty good.  It is not as great as the chub mozzarella, but way better than the stinky day 125 mozzarella.  The biggest problem by FAR with this dish was the inability of the teeny tiny tomatoes and mozzarella to hold enough balsamic vinegar!  There just was not enough surface area.

Isn't it PRETTY?  Turns out we did have enough basil, yippee!!

This cheese is not bad, but the convenience of having the tiny portions does not beat the tastiness of the chub cheese.

Price - $3.49

Rating – 3.5

Day 17 - Mozzarella Cheese Chub

We go through a lot of cheese in our house, the majority of which is cheddar.  But this mozzarella also gets a fair bit of play from us, especially in SUMMER GARDEN SEASON.  Oh yeah – there is nothing better than a big, red, juicy, fresh garden tomato topped by a thick chunk of this mozzarella, add to that a couple of just picked basil leaves, top with extra virgin olive oil, fresh squeezed lemon juice, and coarse salt.  That, my friends, is the taste of summer.  So now you know how we use this cheese J.

Note:  if it is not summer, or if you do not grow tomatoes, pair this with Trader Joe’s Kumatoes (see review from this blog, day 5).

This is the one we get - 8 oz is a good size

 Pros :

• Tasty
• Soft
• Reasonably priced
• Almost always available at Trader Joe’s
• A good size

Cons:

• Tricky to open, and when you do open it – messy.  Mozzarella water gushes out so only open it over the sink. 
• Not possible to store in original packaging, so have a little storage container ready when you open it.
• Goes stale quickly if you do not use it within a few days (probably because all of the mozzarella water stuff plops out of the packaging when you open it so is not in the storage container to keep it moist).

Price - $3.29

Rating – 4 stars