We’ve had our eye on the Trader Joe’s Saucy Scallops with Mushrooms for a while now. We’re huge fans of mushrooms here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, and we know Trader Joe’s has what it takes to make a great mushroom-based dish. But, admittedly, we were being a bit lazy. See, when we saw the package, we thought that these looked like they might be… well, not difficult, per se, but perhaps this would be one of those multi-step meals that take a bit of effort.
As it turns out, our suspicions were quite wrong. This stuff is really easy to make. You can cook it in the oven or even in the microwave, and both of those methods are very simple. We used the third method — the stovetop method – which had us simply dump it into a skillet and heat it up for a few minutes on high heat and a few additional minutes on medium heat. That’s all it takes. We feel pretty silly for overestimating the complexity of cooking this meal. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out our package scans at the bottom of this article.)
Of course, there is one additional step, but it’s optional. It’s recommended that you serve this dish with a rice or pasta, so we picked up some Trader Joe’s Penne Rigate pasta to serve this with, as shown above.
So how are these scallops once they’re done cooking? Well, we think they’re amazing.
The real star of this show is the emmental cheese sauce. It’s rich and creamy, with some sweet undertones that really make it pop. We really love this sauce, and we would love to try it on some other things. It would probably be great over eggplant or even some shell pasta with a little parmesan.
Scallops are a bit like shrimp in that they’re one of the less seafood-y seafoods, though they also taste nothing like shrimp. The flavor of the scallops here is pretty subtle, which is actually good because you wouldn’t want to undermine that delicious cheese sauce. This meal is mostly scallops, and they provide a nice texture more than anything else.
There are mushrooms, of course, and they’re pretty good. However, there are hardly any here so they end up being completely overpowered by the peas in this dish. Seriously, this meal is absolutely loaded with the little green orbs. While some of our staffers have had some pretty bad experiences with peas, these ones actually taste pretty good. They end up being a surprisingly great complement to the sauce.
Trader Joe’s considers about a third of the bag to be a serving, though that’s not very big. We think you could easily polish off this whole bag if you eat it on its own. If you serve it atop pasta, like we did, then it becomes two meals. The image below shows the full bag of scallops served over pasta. As you can see, this is possibly three servings, but we’d say it’s much closer to two.
In the imaginary Trader Joe’s measly serving, there are only 150 calories (70 from fat) and 330 mg of sodium. That means that in the full bag, there are 450 calories (210 from fat) and 990 mg of sodium. That’s really not that bad until you start adding pasta. This only reinforces our position that this should be two servings when served over pasta.
We can’t really comment on how filling this is, since the pasta added some serious carbs to this. We felt very full after eating it, but we’re thinking that’s due to the pasta rather than the scallops.
The Trader Joe’s Saucy Scallops with Mushrooms are skimpy on mushrooms but loaded with flavor nonetheless. If you’re a fan of scallops — or even just tasty cheese sauces — then you should really give these a try. Don’t be like us and put it off for months and months because you think they’ll take a long time to make. They won’t, and even if they did, they’d be well worth the effort.
To learn more about the cooking instructions, nutrition content, or ingredients in this Trader Joe’s frozen scallop and mushroom dish, check out our package scans below.