Price: $2.99
Serving: 1 cookie, 1oz.
Servings per package: 16
Calories: 110 per cookie
Fat: 7%, 4.5g
Cholesterol: 7%, 20mg
Sodium: 3%, 70mg
Protein: 2g
Carbohydrates: 6%, 18g
Fiber: 4%, 1g
Sugar: 10g
Weight Watchers Points: 2 points per cookie

Trader Joe says: Trader Joe’s Oatmeal & Cranberry Cookie Dough is preformed for 16 perfect sized cookies and is ready to bake and enjoy in a matter of minutes. The cranberries in the cookies add a refreshing tartness to a rather sweet dough. . . these are a scrumptious twist on the more traditional oatmeal raisin cookie.

Abi says: As an adult with a palate accepting of a great many things I still do not understand how anyone could ever think the raisin is an acceptable ingredient in baked goods. Raisins are a form of chewy contamination, destroying the goodness of carrot cakes and cookies and making unfamiliar baked items instantly suspect. Cranberries, on the other hand, are fruity little nuggets of joy, adding delight to any item. I’ve used cranberries in making everything from muffins to cookies to biscotti. I love cranberries.

In Trader Joe’s Cranberry Oatmeal Cookie Dough, the cranberries are present without being overwhelming. There are 2-5 cranberry chunks per cookie and each one is a nubbin of chewy bliss. If you want your cookies cranberried-out, this could be a problem. However, each cookie is only 2 inches in diameter, so the cranberries are appropriately present.

The cookie dough itself is just okay, it has a nice balance of sweet and salty, but the texture and taste of oatmeal is missing, resulting in a cookie version of flabby, overcooked pasta. These cookies, whether baked for just 11 minutes (chewy) or 14 minutes (crispy) fall apart if handled with anything other than utmost care (just like the peanut butter cookies). I want an al dente cookie, one that stands up to a train ride to work and gives me an opportunity to enjoy it in forms other than tiny chunks.

A rather intense investigation revealed that rolled oats are the fourth item in the ingredients list after flour, brown sugar and butter. That might seem just fine until one does some further scouting and learns that the Quaker Oats recipe for vanishing oatmeal cookies uses 3 cups of rolled oats to just 1.5 cups of flour. Why are you skimping on the oats, Trader Joe’s?

The other downside to these cookies is that fresh from the oven they’re sort of creepy. Maybe it’s just a personal thing (like my dislike of baked raisins), but warm cranberries give me the willies and detract from what should be a great fresh-from-the-oven experience.

All in all, Trader Joe’s Oatmeal & Cranberry Cookie Dough is an alright way to make some easy breakfast cookies or an after-dinner dessert, but they don’t measure up to the quality of Trader Joe’s frozen chocolate chip cookie dough. Then again, does anything?

Price: $5.00 on sale (not cheap)
Serving: 1 cookie, 1.33oz.
Servings per package 12
Calories: 133
Fat: 6%, 4g
Cholesterol: 8%, 23mg
Sodium: 4%, 85mg
Protein: 1g
Carbohydrates: 8%, 23g
Fiber: 3%, 1g
Sugar: 13g
Weight Watchers Points: 3 Points each

Glutenfreeda says: Dark chocolate cookies with a hissss of mint!

Abi says: Cookies are nature’s perfect food. They’re hand sized (George’s hand shown), crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, full of whatever pleases you (chocolate, fruit, peanut butter) and can be tossed in a ziploc bag for later snacking.

Unfortunately for folks allergic to gluten, nature’s perfect food often comes in an imperfect form. Gluten-free cookies are usually sandy or chalky or crumbly. Sure, they might be delicious (see Trader Joe’s Gluten Free Peanut Butter Cookies), but if they fall apart in your hands & fail to travel well, then they lose the very versatility that makes cookies so prized.

Right away you’ll notice two things about these cookies: they are big and they are chewy. The cookies come in at 1 1/3 ounce each, making for a generous amount of dark, minty chocolate goodness. Usually, frozen and refrigerated cookies are in 1 ounce portions. Glutenfreeda’s cookies include xanthan gum as a substitute for the gluten that makes chewy cookies - well, chewy.

Glutenfreeda’s website features a ton of testimonials regarding the ‘realness’ of these cookies, so many that I get the impression that people have been suffering in wait of a truly good gluten-free cookie. And you know what? You don’t have to be celiac to enjoy these.

The baking instructions say:

Bake Real Cookies directly from the freezer. Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees. Place Real Cookies on an ungreased baking sheet about 3 inches apart. Bake for 20 minutes. Allow a couple of extra minutes baking time. Remove from oven and let cool slightly, then remove them to a rack or directly into your mouth, pausing occasionally to breathe.

But 20 minutes is a really, really long time to bake cookies. I recommend trying a small batch at 15 minutes and seeing how you like that first. The cookies come in a tub with a lid, so you can easily pull out a few for a quick treat or midnight snack. You know, if you feel like preheating an oven and waiting 15 minutes for some cookies to bake. Some deeply chocolatey, chewy, minty cookies.

Now, just because something is Gluten-free or wheat-free or whatever the catchphrase or allergen popular these days doesn’t mean it is healthy. These are cookies. They contain butter and chocolate and sugar. They are not health food. They are delicious.

Price: $4.99
Serving: 1/7th of a bag of fries, 6.666oz.
Servings per package: 7
Calories: 180 per serving
Fat: 9%, 6g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 15%, 350mg
Protein: 2g
Carbohydrates: 6%, 18g
Fiber: 11%, 3g
Sugar: 0g
Weight Watchers Points: 3 Points

Mr. G says: Revolutionize your fries! Mr. G’s Original Garlic Flavored Fries are a great compliment to hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks or any time you have the urge for a truly outrageous snack.

Abi says: I considered going to the Gilroy Garlic Festival a couple of weeks ago, but realized that I didn’t really feel like hanging out in enormous crowds of people who’d been chowing down all day on garlic ice cream, garlic shrimp scampi and garlic and chocolate peanut butter cups. It is one thing to eat a garlicky meal with your partner and then cozy up in front of ‘Becoming Jane’ (the most depressing movie in existence - also, Valley of the Dolls is always checked out- is it worth a rental? I’m turning into that girl who’s always coming into the video store trying to get a title that will never ever be there.). It is quite another (er, back to the Garlic Festival) to endure sweltering heat with 100,000 other garlic stuffed human beings.

So I bought these frozen fries instead.

The G in Mr. G stands for Ghiringhelli and the company that makes these fries is located just north of San Francisco. If you live in the Bay Area and are a locavore of loose morals you could probably qualify this as a local food item. I will just say that the fries themselves contain a lot of weird things (yellow cornmeal, baking soda and guar gum?) but the actual garlic sauce is extremely basic: chopped garlic, canola oil, olive oil, parsley, salt and spices.

These are not all natural fries, but they are very easy to prepare and consume:

1. Preheat oven
2. Place cookie sheet of fries in oven for 20 minutes (no flipping)
3. Put sauce packet in small bowl of warm water
4. Take fries out of oven, toss fries with defrosted garlic sauce, eat.

I thought that these fries would require multiple sessions of flipping, but maybe that’s what the baking soda is for: no fry flipping.

For all of the ease in preparation, these fries come out of the oven perfectly crisp. This probably has something to do with them being pre-cooked and full of extaneous ingredients. Rice flour, anyone?

The garlic sauce is pungent and abundant, easily coating every fry with a greasy jacket of parsley-flecked oil. Half of the sauce would have been plenty, so if you’re making these at home restraint is your friend. Unless you’re trying to sabotage someone’s diet. Then restraint is your enemy.

The ‘7 servings per package’ concept is utter crap. More accurately there are 3-4 servings in here, which means you’ll need to double all of the nutritional information above.

Now to the promises made in the package. Are these fries revolutionary? Not if you live anywhere near a Gordon Biersch Brewery: they’ve been making garlic fries for 20 years. Do garlic fries pair well with assorted barbecue meats? I imagine so, thought I had mine with macaroni and cheese (carbtacular!). Are the fries outrageous? Only if you’re a vampire.

[Note: Not reviewed here or available at my local store are the other truly outrageous varieties of these fries. If you see them please, please purchase and review them. Please. Other fries:

• Cheddar Bacon
• Pepperoni Pizza
• Smokin’ BBQ Ranch
• Cheddar Cheese

Pepperoni Pizza French Fries! OMG!]

Price: $5.00
Serving: 1 package, 9.5oz.
Calories per serving: 320
Fat: 28%, 18g
Cholesterol: 7%, 20mg
Sodium: 23%, 550mg
Protein: 8g
Carbohydrates: 12%, 36g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
Sugar: 6g
Weight Watchers Points: 7 Points

Amy’s Kitchen says: An Authentic blend of spices in a base of organic crushed tomatoes and coconut milk, with soft, creamy cubes of paneer (Indian Cheese). Alongside the Paneer Tikka are Aloo Palak (delicately spiced organic chopped spinach and tender potatoes), and organic basmati rice flavored with cumin and carrots.

Abi says: Microwavable meals require too much attention: flipping, mid-cycle stirring, gravy-defrosting, and post-heating assembly are all negatives when it comes to frozen food. This entrée from Amy’s Kitchen required only a slightly opened cellophane wrapping and 5 no-worry minutes in the microwave, making a fantastic first impression.

“This is too easy.” I thought, expecting a disaster. Ah, there are caveats. Removing the meal from the plastic wrapper is fraught with danger, but what makes a meal more savored that preliminary steam burns? (Seriously though, if you’re thinking about keeping a few of these in the freezer for your kids or significant other, warn them about the invisible danger: steam) Another hazard: the environmentally-friendly, biodegradable paper tray wobbles under the gelatinous weight of the paneer-tikka-palak-rice combo. Sturdy dinnerware solves that problem, but for those offices (or homes) that stock few plates this could be an issue.

When it comes to the actual food, Amy’s Paneer Tikka isn’t take-out. Banish those thoughts of buttery, soupy palak and sweat-inducing masala. This meal is healthy, introductory Indian. Indian food for Iowans, if you will.

Anyone who’s ever made the mistake of buying a block of plastic-wrapped paneer (me, for example) will instantly realize that the cheese in this meal is fresh, fresh, fresh. I couldn’t believe that I’d pulled it out of the freezer just 10 minutes earlier. My five cubes of paneer (29% less cheese than shown on the box) were resiliently fluffy and provided a mild, buttery contrast to the rich, tomato-based masala.

The palak aloo (aka ‘cooked spinach and potatoes’, not ‘region of Iraq‘) isn’t completely macerated or strongly spiced, which means that the flavor of cooked spinach shines through. This is a positive or a negative depending on your relationship with cooked spinach. Guessing, I’d say that this meal contains 800% less butter than most Indian meals I consume.

And the rice. It is ricey. Each grain is fluffy and delicate and hey! there’s some stuff in the rice! (carrots and cumin seeds) You won’t notice either of those things while you’re eating the rice, but they make for a nice visual. My preferred eating method is to simply mix everything together and enjoy a subcontinental ghoulash. The rice holds in the masala (which is a danger to light-colored clothing) and the intensity of the cooked spinach is tempered by the cheese. I know, this meal seems really expensive right now, but after eating it you really will have another reason to feel good about yourself today.*

*Yeah, that’s the Smart Ones tagline and I totally stole it, but I unlike EVERY SINGLE EXPERIENCE, EVER that I’ve had with a Smart Ones meal, I really did feel good after I had this frozen meal.