Trader Joe’s Chicken Sausage and Cornbread Stuffing and Turkey Gravy

It’s that time of year again! Trader Joe’s transforms their store into a little holiday oasis. I think they swap out about 25% of the regular items for holiday goodies! Ginger bread house kits! (Coming in a review near you soon) Along with a lot of the goofy stuff, there is some serious food items that many of you are interested in. Things like turkey dinners, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc, etc… We will be reviewing as many of these items as is humanly possible between now and the end of the holiday season.

First up is an old favorite around Club Trader Joe’s – Stuffing! I love stuffing and I can eat pounds of it during the holiday season. My mother (and grandmother’s) stuffing recipe is bar-none the best stuffing in the world. I simply can’t imagine cooking a turkey without it.

In this review you get a 2-fer. Stuffing and gravy together! They go together so great and you really can’t have stuffing without the gravy, IMHO. So when the holiday related foods popped up in Trader Joe’s last week, I picked up a few things and decided to give this stuffing a whirl. There is actually a couple of different selections for stuff this year and this was in the fridge section with all the turkeys and other Thanksgiving related stuff – next to it was this gravy. I picked that up too since I love gravy so much!

If I had to do it again, I would prepare the stuffing per the oven heating instructions, I think microwaving is not the best way to prepare it, but I was hungry and short on time. It was pretty easy. The typical “lift the corner of the plastic and heat on high for 4 minutes” deal. It smelled pretty good coming out of the microwave. I put it all on a plate to look at it and taste it. Immediately, it needed something else so I sprinkled on a little salt (which perked it up) but it was still a little dry. I cracked open the turkey gravy and heated up a cup of it in the microwave. First I’ll say the stuffing isn’t half bad! It had nice herb flavors and you can see chunks of sausage in it. The bread on the other hand did not look at all like the picture. While there were chunks of bread, they weren’t really recognizable as pieces of bread but more like rounded balls of bread. Not really great consistency. The flavors as a whole were quite nice and I bet if I put it in the oven this would’ve been much better. I could see buying this again, but I wouldn’t serve it to guests at a Thanksgiving meal. I would make a nice side to a weeknight meal.

So I heated the gravy up and tasted it. In one word, yuck! To me it tasted like unsalted cardboard. It sure looked good on the cover of the box, but this is the 2nd blandest thing I’ve ever tasted from TJs (the first being the fake cream cheese I tasted a couple weeks ago). If you want to buy gravy, I would recommend something like Campbell’s turkey gravy – it’s much better. Best case just make a whole mess of gravy when you make your turkey at Thanksgiving and freeze it something to keep gravy in the house for a while.

OK, two reviews here.

I rate the Chicken Sausage and Cornbread Stuffing 7 bells.

OTOH, I rate the Turkey Gravy 2 bells. Yuck!