Winter Snowflake Pasta

I love pasta shapes, so when Trader Joe's comes out with a new shaped pasta, it usually ends up in the cart. This winter snowflake pasta appeared near the end of last year and looked like a fun shape that would hold sauce well in all of the little snowflake holes.

The pasta did indeed hold the sauce, but we found that the thickness of the pieces wasn't that uniform. That meant that if you tested one piece and it was al dente, it didn't mean all the rest were equally cooked through. I think if we had realized in advance how different some of them were, we would have probably cooked them on the longer side. They were good, but not as good as some other shapes we've had before.

Buy again? If this were to turn up again, probably not. We didn't like it as much as some others, and I prefer vegetable or whole wheat pasta for health reasons, so probably not.

Joe-Joe's Truffles

How is it already February?! We haven't posted all year, and we haven't even finished writing up our 2017 favorite food memories. It's been incredibly busy and chaotic as we prepare for our move, but there's so much we've wanted to write about (or needed to, so we don't forget our rapidly fading memories), whether it's trip recaps or our favorite food memories from last year or my thoughts on abandoning the 52 week cooking challenge. Need to start creating a good habit again and exercising that creative writing part of our brains, and Trader Joe's reviews seem like a good way to dive back in.

Last year, in an attempt to cut down on food waste, I started making lists of all of our food and their respective expiration dates. As a result, we often end up eating our snacks close to their expiration date, because (a) we have a backlog of too many snack foods and (b) we often forget about things until they turn up on the list as close to expiring when they get buried or put away out of sight. That was the case with these Joe-Joe's truffles that we apparently picked up last April, but I thought was much, much more recent than that. (Time is flying.)

Anyway, we were intrigued by the Joe-Joe's truffles, because we have tried just about every variety of Joe-Joe's cookies. These combine the traditional chocolate vanilla Joe-Joe's, crumbled, with more creme from inside the cookies and white chocolate, and then have a coating of dark chocolate and pastel sprinkles. (Now that I'm reading the description again, April makes so much more sense. Pastel sprinkles, Easter candy, that whole thing.) They came in a box of 12 with each truffle separated, and other than having less sprinkles, looked pretty close to what was on the box design. We really liked these. They actually tasted like Joe-Joe's cookies, but in a softer, chewier, far less crumbly form. Texturally, they were basically like cake pops without sticks. A wondered if they might have tasted fresher or different months ago, but they were still quite good and didn't taste that old like some other chocolate we've had close to its expiration date. Not sure if these will be back this spring, but if they are, it might be our springtime treat!

Buy again? Probably. They would be more of a treat purchase for us than a regular thing (we definitely don't need more snacks or chocolate to add to the list), but since they're seasonal (if they return at all), a once-a-year treat sounds good to us.