If you’ve got a holiday party coming up, you should probably make sure you’ve got some appetizers ready. Of course, you could always do something simple, like making cookies or bars, or just picking up some chips and dip. But if you really want to impress your guests, you can be a little bit more creative. For example, Trader Joe’s Turkey Cranberry Meatballs do the trick quite nicely.
Today we’re not talking about meatballs, though. There’s another holiday appetizer we’ve been itching to try for a while now, the Trader Joe’s Uncured Bacon Wrapped Dates Stuffed with Goat Cheese. The box claims there should be about ten dates inside. We can’t confirm that every box has exactly ten, but ours certainly did.
These are pretty simple to heat. Just preheat your oven to 425 degrees fahrenheit, pop these on a cookie sheet and cook for about 12 minutes. Be sure to flip them over at about the halfway mark.
Now, just to warn you: these things produce a very potent bacon smell when they’re in the oven. You’re going to be tempted to pull them out early and start munching!
When these do come out, they come out loaded with grease. As you can see in our image above, we felt it was necessary to put down a paper towel to absorb some of it. While these are a finger food, you’ll definitely want to have a stack of napkins nearby when you eat these. Or, you could put a nice little toothpick in each one if you really want to class it up.
We were actually kind of surprised by how sweet these were. The bacon portion is just a paper-thin layer around the date, so the dates account for a majority of the flavor (even though the bacon accounts for a majority of the scent). And these are incredibly rich. Hoo boy, are these little guys ever rich! By the time you eat the recommended amount of four, you’ll be looking for a glass of milk to wash these down with.
There’s also a bit of goat cheese inside, though we found it to contribute the least to the flavor. It’s really just there to offset the sweetness of the dates, which could have easily been overwhelming without the goat cheese to keep it in check.
Now, since it’s the holidays, you’re probably not counting calories as carefully as you would be during beach season. But we’re going to point something out here anyway: these are loaded with calories. A serving size is about four dates, and that serving contains 210 calories (120 from fat). If you end up eating a whole box of these, that ends up being 525 calories. Keep in mind these are just a little tiny side and they definitely won’t make a meal. You could eat this whole box and not feel like you’ve done anything for your hunger. So be careful with these.
Trader Joe’s Uncured Bacon Wrapped Dates Stuffed with Goat Cheese are way sweeter than we expected. If two people show up at a potluck, and one brings some of these while the other brings some of the Turkey Cranberry Meatballs we mentioned earlier, we think the bearer of meatballs will be the more popular guest. But these bacon-wrapped dates aren’t a bad thing to have in your holiday food arsenal either.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in these Trader Joe’s snacks, check out our package scan below.