#2: Trader Joe's (Triple) Ginger Brew
a diet of dumplings
In summer of 2016 I moved to New York City for a summer internship. It was my first time ever living outside of Massachusetts, and my parents were less than thrilled when two days before departure I realized that the summer housing I had reserved at Columbia started a week after my start date. Fortunately, I was able to convince a distant high school friend to let me crash on the dusty linoleum floor of her tiny NYU studio for that first week. Unfortunately her neighbors (classmates?) had a habit of playing music until 3:30 each morning, and I was more than relieved when the day came to drag my mattress pad and backpack of clothes uptown to my new digs.
I had spent nearly all my savings on that housing, and due to some very unfortunate timing and a large dose of bureaucracy it would take two weeks for my new employer to put me on payroll, and then almost two weeks after that to get my first payday. I was too proud (especially after getting an earful about messing up the housing schedule) to ask my parents for money to hold me over, so for that first month I budgeted like a squirrel on his last acorn. About 30% of my meals were from various halal carts. My favorite is still the Halal Guys’ cart near Times Square, where $10 (cash only, of course) will get you enough food to feed a 20-year-old male for two meals.
The other 70% mostly came in the form of frozen food from the Columbus Circle Trader Joe’s. On my first trip I got a little carried away and spent a full hour in the store loading up my cart with bag after frozen bag. I remember being very surprised when the cashier tried to cram my entire cart of groceries into just two double-layered paper bags, but then realized he had done it so that I would have a fighting chance of carrying it all onto the subway. Somehow I was able to elbow through the turnstiles and make it all the way back to my front door before one of the bags’ handles snapped and sent a bottle of soy sauce rolling down the steps, which miraculously didn’t shatter.
Trader Joe’s is kind of like the the Toyota of grocery stores: affordable, reliable, and sometimes surprisingly good - like the $2.99 pork potstickers, which at around 2 meals per bag was the ultimate in dollar-to-calorie ratio, perhaps only losing out to the Costco hot dog. I think in that first month I ate 12 bags, which is somewhere around 350 dumplings. I had them boiled, pan-fried, boiled then pan-fried, boiled then pan-fried then microwaved, and a few times just straight microwaved. When I felt I needed some vegetables I just threw a scoop of frozen peas in with the dumplings. Even today I always keep a bag of them in the fridge for backup.
Unfortunately, if the potstickers were akin to the ultra-reliable Toyota Camry, the Triple Ginger Brew I got this past week felt more like a Yaris: it’ll get you from point A to point B, but it just feels like it’s missing a few things. It comes in a cute emerald green swing-top bottle that is perfect for the holidays and could be repurposed as one of those fancy water bottles they bring out after making a face when you ask for “tap” instead of bottled (or god forbid sparkling 🤢) water at restaurants that have at least three dollar signs on google maps. But besides the exterior, I didn’t really love this one.
Fun-fact of the day: the swing-top bottle stopper was invented by Charles de Quillfeldt in 1875. Apparently it wasn’t good enough the first time so he filed an improvement to his original design in 1898.
Review: Trader Joe’s (Triple) Ginger Brew
Taste:
Confusing. It’s neither sweet nor spicy - honestly, it was disappointingly watery. I feel like if the flavor went a bit in either direction it would have been much better.
Carbonation:
The first few sips were ok - not super fizzy but enough to feel like a soda and not a juice. The problem came after a few days. The green swing-top bottle doesn’t seem to do a great job of keeping things bubbly and the brew felt progressively weaker to the point of staleness by the fourth day.
Price:
$2.99 for a 750ml bottle, which works out to 11.79 cents per ounce. (At some point I’ll have comparison charts for this, maybe?)
Where to buy:
Your local Trader Joe’s.
One-liner:
Skip this and buy a bag of pork potstickers instead!