Most of us can appreciate food items that allow us to make easy and quick dinners. If you’re not gluten-free, there are countless items that make that possible, but for the gluten-free set, options are more limited. When I noticed that the box of Steamer Clams with garlic butter sauce in the freezer at Trader Joe’s was sporting their signature “g” symbol, I decided to buy it.
The clams are very easy to prepare. You put the frozen contents of the box into a hot pan, cover it and in about eight minutes the clams are ready. Before I started cooking the clams, I started sauteing some asparagus and boiling some Tagliatelle pasta from Schar. Because the sauce in the clam pan was so watery (and not very flavorful), I decided to mix a little pesto sauce with the cooked pasta. This last-minute decision turned out to save dinner.
All of the clams opened up during the cooking cycle and there was just a little sauce – or rather a broth – in the pan when they were ready. Clams are not my favorite type of seafood, but they’re fine to have every so often. For some reason, we have not had clams in well over a year. Even so, when I tasted the clams from Trader Joe’s, I remembered the taste of the canned clams we used to eat. Surprisingly, the canned version was better than the ones at this dinner.
The ingredients in the clams are simple and easy to pronounce. That is something I’m always looking for with prepared items. The ingredients include clams, butter, cream (milk), salt, garlic, modified cornstarch, natural butter flavor, lemon, parsley, citric acid, and spices. That sounds like something that would taste good to me. However, a blander dish of clams I’ve never had. It’s hard to believe that there was any garlic in them because they neither smelled nor tasted like that was the case.
The Schar pasta was excellent as always and it’s a good thing I’d added the pesto sauce to it before topping it with the very flavorless clams. I ate very few clams but did have a bit of extra pasta. We usually have the Schar pasta with cream or red sauce and were pleased that it was so good with very little adornment. When I say I used a little pesto sauce - I mean there was only a tiny bit of it.
In the past, we’ve enjoyed many prepared dinners from Trader Joe’s that are gluten-free. In fact, I think the steamer clam entree is the only one that we were not impressed even slightly with. The package says there are three 70-calorie servings in it, but it was at best two servings for us.
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