Cauliflower Pizza Crust

Apparently, this new Cauliflower Pizza Crust from Trader Joe’s is all the rage.

But let’s be clear – like other things that are “all the rage”, this does not mean it is a wise thing to rush out and buy.  And to prove that point, may I present, the come-back of the jumpsuit for women. Here is what H & M says about jumpsuits for women on their website:  "Jumpsuits are effortless, chic and fun. In our selection of women’s jumpsuits you can be both bohemian and classic chic – just alter your accessories and heel height."  To that I say - BWAHAHAHAHA!

A Google search for "Women's Jumpsuit" led me to this, a "bridesmaid jumpsuit".
Oh sure, she looks all classy NOW.  Just wait til she has to pee...

As anyone who has ever made the ridiculous decision to wear one of these “must have” all in one outfits on a long distance flight will tell you, DON’T.  Peeing in one of these contraptions in a public restroom, ANY public restroom, is a nightmare.  Now couple the grossness of a public restroom and pieces of your outfit scraping the pee-stained floor with the NYC-studio-apartment-sized-ness of an airplane bathroom.   You get where I am going with this, right??  Just because something is “all the rage” doesn’t mean you should JUMP ON BOARD.

But I digress.  Back to the TJ’s Cauliflower Pizza Crust…

It comes in a box, frozen

One of my Facebook friends mentioned how great it was, so while at TJ’s I sought one out.  Only, it was suuuch the rage that they were sold out of them…

Fast forward a couple more shopping trips, and we “snagged” a cauliflower pizza crust of our very own.  We topped ours with A LOT of stuff – homemade pesto, red onion, green pepper, garlic, TJ’s grilled balsamic chicken (which is great and I need to review!), TJ’s kumatos (which we eat a lot of, the review of them can be seen here: kumato review ), TJ’s feta in brine (which is the BEST grocery store feta you can get (outside of Greece… 😊  ) and whose review can be seen here:  feta in brine review ), and TJ’s mushrooms (plus salt and pepper).

David:  “It is nice.  What can I say?  It has got carbohydrate crunch but vegetable tastiness.  Then when you pile it high with all of the vegetable and meat and cheese and olives that we did, it’s great!  The one downside is that it is really hard to cut.  What a pizza!  I dunno – I will give it a 4.”

Photo of David BEFORE eating this product.  He looks very hesitant.
But, as you can read in his review, he actually liked it when we ate it.

Susan:  I don’t read other TJ’s blogs and reviews because I do not want them to influence my opinion before I taste and review something, but I DID get a glimpse of something before eating this product that basically said, “TJ’s Cauliflower Pizza Crust is the BOMB and you MUST get one!”.  To that I say:  I DON’T GET IT. 

It took 24 minutes just to cook the CRUST.  Then you put the stuff on it and broil it.  The taste of the crust (to me) is grainy, I guess because of the corn flour in it?  The texture reminds me of a bad polenta.  The texture definitely leaves something to be desired.

Here is our Cauliflower Crust, loaded down with goodness.  The burned bits tasted a little better than the rest of the crust.

And sadly, I do not get any of the CAULIFLOWER taste, I just get a BAD CRUST taste…  I confess that we piled ours high with too many toppings, so maybe they are masking the cauliflower?  I tried a bit of burnt crust, and I liked it better…  But still, overall, if you are not on a gluten free diet or something where you need to avoid gluten, I say go with a regular pizza crust.  Trader Joe’s has a terrific one that you roll out (which garnered a coveted 5 star review and only costs $1.19!  Review and photos here:  pizza dough review) – get that instead!  It is more fun to prepare, doesn’t feel grainy when you eat it, and is much tastier than this cauliflower contraption.  I give this 3 stars.

Price: $3.99

Rating (average of 2 raters): 3.5

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

Day 5 - Kumatoes

At first glance, kumatoes look, well, gross.  They are tomatoes, but they are BROWN.  And normally the last thing I want my tomato to be is brown. 

But when summer is over and our garden is no longer providing us with plump, ripe, red tomatoes, I am willing to go out on a limb and experiment to find a good substitute.  And KUMATOES are it! 

Kumato - see, they are odd looking...

They are not cheap - $3.49 for a pack of 5 – but they are a good substitute for the months when all other store bought tomatoes taste like dry cardboard.   I like them best when they are still a bit firm and a mix of green and brown.  I would prefer if I could buy them individually so I could do a little squeeze test on each one, but since it is Trader Joe’s you have to accept whatever is in the pack you choose.  And I must add, every once in a while you will get a “dud” - a yucky one.  But the good far outweigh the bad.

We most often eat these sliced and topped with mozzarella , olive oil, a squeeze of fresh lemon juice, and salt.  That is a simple to make and terrific tasting appetizer or salad course.  Just writing about them now is making my mouth water a bit.

Kumato serving suggestion - sliced and topped with mozzarella cheese, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt

Price - $3.49, which comes out to around .70 cents per fruit

Rating – 4 stars