During the pandemic, when everything was closed and people were working from home, a lot of us started experimenting with new recipes to cook at home. Some of our staffers, for example, were getting experimental with omelets and fajitas. And what’s something that makes both of those things better? Peppers and onions, of course!
We’re no strangers to frozen bags of peppers and onions, so we thought we’d pick some up at Trader Joe’s and see how they compare to the generic ones we’ve been using from the dollar store. Yes, today we’re checking out the Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Bell Peppers and Onions. This isn’t a complex food by any means, so we doubt we’ll be writing a complex review. But we can still give them a taste and see what we think!
Of course, there are a million ways to serve these, and several ways to cook them (the package only gives stovetop instructions, but we guarantee you could toss these on a grill, and we’re pretty sure you could even microwave them if you really wanted to). We tossed ours into a skillet with some oil and cooked them until they were good and toasty. It only took us a few minutes, so we don’t see any benefit to attempting to microwave these besides saving yourself from having to wash a skillet. (You can read the full cooking instructions by checking out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
As you can probably see in the image above, these are diced up pretty small. That’s a huge win in our book. When we were buying these at the dollar store, we’d end up having to chop everything up as we were cooking it because the pieces were too big. We really appreciate the extra effort here. (We did run to the freezer to check on our dollar-store veggies, and they’re the Birds-Eye Pepper Stir-Fry.)
As we mentioned earlier, this is a simple bag of veggies. You’ve got onions mixed into a batch of green, red, and yellow bell peppers. No fancy seasonings or anything. These veggies are a blank canvas on which you can paint your own cuisine masterpiece.
These are pre-fire-roasted, and you’ll see the black grill marks on them when you open up the bag. This really gives the peppers some extra oomph, though we think it’s not always a perfect match for the onions. While we love the peppers with that fire-roasted flavor, we’d prefer the onions to be a little less burnt. Still, nothing was bad; we just like the peppers way more than the onions here. This beats out the Birds-Eye bags we were buying for sure.
One serving of this is 2/3 of a cup, which is pretty reasonable if you’re eating these as part of a bigger meal. And really, we doubt you’ll be munching on these straight out of the bag like they’re Doritos or something! If you stick with the recommended amount, you’re looking at 25 calories and no sodium. You really can’t beat that. This means you can justify adding these to just about anything you can think of without sending your calorie count skyrocketing.
The Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Bell Peppers and Onions might be a simple bag of veggies, but what’s here is still great. We love that these are diced a bit smaller than your more generic options, and everything tastes great (though the onions aren’t perfect, in our book). We tossed these on a fairly straightforward roasted chicken sandwich for the sake of this review, and boy howdy, did they ever improve it!
That’s a mighty fine sandwich, folks!
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen veggies, check out our package scans below.
