Price: $2.69
Serving: 11 oz.
Calories: 290 per serving
Fat: 5%, 3.5g
Cholesterol: 10%, 30mg
Sodium: 25%, 590mg
Protein: 16g
Carbohydrates: 16%, 47g
Fiber: 11%, 3g
Sugar: 3g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Trader Joe says: Vegetables and white chicken with a vindaloo curry sauce served over steamed rice.

Chaviva says: The U.S. Department of Agriculture inspected this little bowl of Indian nosh or wholesomeness, but they didn’t inspect it for deliciousness.

When I first saw this dish, I was immediately stoked. You see, I’ll do anything to try a new Indian dish if I don’t have to go to a public restaurant and eat alone. I whipped out my BlackBerry, clicked on the bookmarked Weight Watchers calculator and punched in the figures. I was very pleased to find out that Trader Joe’s Chicken Vindaloo was only 5 points (about the average point value for a Lean Cuisine — my lunch entree of choice), and thus purchased the frozen bowl o’meal.

After heating the bowl for 4 minutes, then stirring the contents (most of which were still frozen) and popping it back in for another 4 minutes, I scurried to my office to sit, huddled over the bowl, for the brief lunch break I take. Upon first bite, I was shocked with the taste of nothing. This is a curry dish and I pride myself on being a “hot head” — that is, I am able to withstand all foods at any heat level — but this meal was completely benign. I decided to not judge it upon first bite, and took another. The spices started finding their way into the nooks and recesses of my mouth, and it started to taste more like Indian fare, but it reminded me of leftovers. I swore I was eating day-old peas and carrots from a failed stew and leftover chicken from a failed soup and leftover rice, just mushed together in a little black bowl and stuffed into the freezer section at Trader Joe’s. I could throw this together at home if the only requirement for wholesomeness is to “taste like a leftover mash.”

The look of the meal also resembled that of leftovers, like when you go to a restaurant and they stuff the rice in with the entree. That drives me crazy because it means that I don’t get that fresh rice-meets-entree experience. I eat a lot of frozen meals at my boring office job, and this definitely doesn’t rank up with my favorites. The chicken was plenty tender, but it failed to wow me the way that a lot of other pre-packaged Indian meals I’ve had have done — especially on the flavor indicator. I did finish the entire bowl, but only becuase I didn’t want to have to figure out the points value for only eating some bizarre fraction of the meal. Afterward, my mouth felt as though it had consumed a full Indian buffet, but a piece of gum took care of that sad untruth.

Alas, Indian nosh, you are banished to the Dept. of Agriculture for further testing. Wholesomeness just isn’t enough these days.

Price: $3.99
Serving: 1 package, 12oz.
Calories: 470 per serving
Fat: 22%, 14g
Cholesterol: 17%, 50mg
Sodium: 35%, 840mg
Protein: 26g
Carbs: 20%, 61g
Fiber: 44%, 11g
Weight Watchers Points: 10 points

Trader Joe says: Chicken, rice, black beans, salsa, cheddar cheese, and monterey jack cheese.

Abi says: By now we’ve all heard the horror stories about fattening, calorie-laden burritos produced by a company that rhymes with Schmapotle. Their tortilla alone is 330 calories and has 8 grams of fat. Basically, you could have a burrito wrapper or an entire Lean Cuisine.

Wanting to avoid crazy-bad tortillas, I was lured in by Trader Joe’s tortilla-free chicken burrito bowl. Available in the fridge section at TJ’s, these bowls are purported to contain chicken, rice, black beans, salsa, cheddar cheese and monterey jack cheese. Plus, they aren’t frozen, which makes me think that perhaps they are freshly made. I am now aware that ‘freshly made’ does not equal ‘delicious’.

The chicken portion was minuscule and difficult to find, turning my lunch into a game of ‘Find the Chicken’. The cheese, which appears so abundantly in the ‘before’ image, managed to lose any semblance of flavor by the time it became the ‘after’ image, turning into a cheesy version of beans. Great, I had a brick of beans, weighing in at 12 ounces, with the occasional kernel of corn in there to remind me that I could find something better to eat if I tried. Sure, I would have been full if I’d consumed the entire thing, but I wouldn’t have been satisfied.

Newsflash to the world: Instead of paying four dollars for this meal, I could have purchased a can of refried beans for 79¢, opened it, and eaten beans straight from the can. That is just how exciting and delicious I found this overwhelmingly beany burrito bowl.

That blandness, combined with my complete lack of salsa (a crisis in and of itself) meant that I had to venture out into the world to get a sandwich. An $8.00 sandwich. Thanks a lot, Trader Joe’s. From now on, I’ll always have a backup meal on hand.

Price: $2.00 on sale
Serving: 1/2 tray, 7oz.
Calories: 160 per serving
Fat: 6%, 4g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 20%, 490mg
Protein: 10g
Carbohydrates: 8%, 23g
Fiber: 36%, 9g
Sugar: 4g
Weight Watchers Points: 3 Per Serving

Trader Joe says: This classic Northeastern Spanish dish from the Rioja area can be enjoyed tapas style with many other savory dishes or just enjoy on its own. The lentils are slow cooked in a broth called Sofrito, made with tomatoes, oil, onion, and red and green peppers. Ole!

Andrew says: Ole! Indeed! But someone should tell this dish that spitting is unkind and frowned upon in polite society. When I opened this shelf-stable plastic pack of sloshy, soupy lentils and veggies, it spit beans and tasty-smelling sauce on my hand and the table. And then when I heated it up in the microwave, the dish proceeded to spurt more of the Sofrito all over the microwave’s turntable dish.

But even with the spillage, there was plenty of smoky, spicy, warm Sofrito for my beans and pepper bits to bathe in. In fact the dish was a lot more soupy than I was expecting. After a few brothy slurps of beans and decently flavorful peppers, I got out my Garden Salsa Sun Chips and proceeded to dip them in the soup. This was a great way to enjoy my chips and soup. I recommend doing this with any chips you like.

The soup itself, sans chips, is also fairly enjoyable, but it gets a bit boring after a while. I love beans in general, and lentils are small but robust and make me feel like I’m eating a lot even when I’m not eating that much. And there are a lot of lentils in this. And the sauce, while pleasant, kind of overwhelms everything a bit with its smoky warmth and there’s not a lot of variety in the flavors going on. It’s OK, but, you know, it’s just OK. This would be great with some other stuff, some meats and cheeses and salads and what not, but by itself it’s just a bit too homogeneous to hold my attention without delicious chips.

Price: $3.99
Serving: 1 crab cake, 3oz.
Calories: 220 per serving
Fat: 22%, 15g
Cholesterol: 25%, 75mg
Sodium: 18%, 420mg
Protein: 11g
Carbohydrates: 5%, 14g
Fiber: 12%, 3g
Sugar: 3g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 per cake

Trader Joe says: Nada. They just have a photo of some nice looking crab cakes with a dollop of dill sauce and what looks like lemon and a green salad.

Abi says: I’ve had a lot of trouble writing this review. I know, I probably say that every 5th review, but this time I really mean it. This time, whenever I think about how bad these crab cakes were I throw up a little in my mouth.

Trader Joe’s ‘fresh’ crab cakes go directly against all of the wonderfulness that characterizes TJ’s. Instead of flavorful, interesting food, purchasers of these crab cakes get two three-ounce patties of minced crab meat bound with enough mayo and pureed red bell pepper to confuse the palate. Is it crab, or is it a non-crab pseudo-fish substitute created by evil vegetarians?

These crab cakes aren’t microwaveable (there are no microwaveable crab cakes available at this time. If you see some in the store with microwave directions, do not buy them.), but they are a pre-made, ready-to-cook food and I know that crab cakes cook up super fast with very little work. So little work in fact that it is easy to burn and/or overcook them.

Mine in the photo are overcooked, but overcooking doesn’t account for the gummy interior of each cake. If you’ve ever had good crab cakes, you know that they should essentially be lumps of crab meat barely held together with a binder of egg, bread crumbs, and a bit of herbs and spice. I don’t think the people at Trader Joe’s ever got that memo or perused The Joy of Cooking (Joy is also recommended by Thomas Douglas, author of I Love Crabcakes!, so you can trust me on this one). Instead, these crab cakes are like crab hamburgers. But with lots of mayonnaise. Inside of them. I suppose these would be pretty effective for feeding seafood to babies. Or my grandfather, who I just learned had such bad acid reflux recently that all of his food has to be blended until his esophagus heals. There’d be no blending necessary with these crab cakes.

These crabcakes earn zero stars. ZERO. I’ve also written a letter to Trader Joe’s letting them know how bad these are. My hope is that enough people will complain and Trader Joe’s will make these disastrous seafood items disappear from the shelves, replaced by something more palatable, like quesadillas. Or edible crab cakes.

This review is dedicated to you, all of your poor folks who don’t live within driving distance of a Trader Joe’s. This one time, you get to gloat about your shopping situation.