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I shop at TJ's about once a month - some of their prices and selection can't be beat...but my love for them took a nosedive this past spring when I found out that a lot of their frozen produce is from China. :-( Also, their fresh garlic is sometimes from China as well, and this was confirmed by customer service. Apparently, it's all PACKAGED in California, but it's not all grown there.

Maybe it's that I'm spoiled by living in Manhattan, but Trader Joe's -- based on my single experience there -- carries nothing that I can't get in a cleaner, considerably more organized store with staff that is more helpful and pleasant and cash-register lines that don't reach to Connecticut. My interest in 47 different kinds of trail mix is extremely limited. It may be that the Trader Joe's in Manhattan is skewed to appeal to the NYU students in the dorm right next door. It sure as hell isn't designed to appeal to cooks. Or grown-ups.

Before mastering the art of basic pastry dough, I attempted a plum tart. I made the dough, thinking all was well-and-good, and put it in the fridge to chill. Then, I made the plum filling with fresh greenmarket plums. It looked, smelled, and tasted wickedly delicious. But, when the time came to assemble the thing...the dough was horrendeous.

I ended up trashing the whole thing and making a lousy plum cake.
Drat!

I totally forgot to look for Two Buck Chuck!

Thanks to everyone who posted. I enjoyed reading your responses. Understand that alot of the items I saw in TJ's are a.) not available near me b.) too expensive if they are available or c.) of poor quality, so my maiden voyage to the store was exhilirating in a food-geek sort of way. I can't wait to go back. With a cooler. Or two.

The next establishments on my list of "Stores I Must Visit Before I Die": Whole Foods (regardless of the prices/impending world domination) and Wegman's.

I've had my fair share of culinary disasters, but I really want to share my favourite family story, and that belongs to my Dad. Back in the early 90s when he couldn't cook, my Mum went away for the weekend.

Dad 'made' my sister and I quiche which he must have found in the very bottom of our chest freezer. It was rank... even after 30 mins in the over it was basically a pastry case with raw egg and bits of ham floating around inside.

Being just into my teens and newly aware of things like food poisoning and salmonella, I refused to eat it on safety grounds. My younger sister did likewise. My normally mild-mannered Dad had obviously had a hard day looking after the pair of us and blew his top, saying we always ate what Mum put in front of us (well yeah, that was cooked...!) and banning us from leaving the table until we'd cleaned our plates.

Terrified of dying due to consumption of runny quiche and unable to call Mum in the days before mobile phones, we sat there with tear streaked faces for two hours until Dad admitted defeat and sent us to bed.

The next day Mum returned and the second she got through the door I ran out and shouted: 'Mum, quiche isn't supposed to be runny, IS it?' Mum just turned to Dad, raised one eyebrow and said: 'What have you done now?!'

These days, my Dad is a thoroughly modern man who makes a mean spaghetti carbonara. But we like to remind him often of the worst weekend of our teens and 'the day he nearly killed us with his cooking' :o)

I've loved to cook since an early age. I remember back when I was still in elementary school, I decided to try to create one of my Dad's favorite pies, pecan pie, for his birthday. It was the first pie I'd ever made on my own, but it sounded pretty easy. Got the pie crust done, the filling was in and I spent oodles of time getting the pecans to look just right on top of the pie.

Halfway through the baking cycle, I smelled the most horrible smell and entered a completely smoke-filled kitchen. My Mom and Dad kicked in from there and got the "pie" out of the oven. When the smoke cleared, we realized what I had done. I had used a pie tin that had originally house a pie purchased from the bakery that HAD HOLES PUNCHED IN THE BOTTOM OF IT! All of the pecan pie filling (except the nuts) had seeped right through the crust and had become a lump of charcoal completely stuck to the bottom of the oven.

Let's add insult to injury -- this was before self-cleaning ovens were available. Nuff said.

I miss Trader Joe's. The market is glutted by "whole paycheck" (Whole foods) here in Denver. Sigh....TJ's please come to Denver? PLEASE!!???

I grew up a couple towns over from the original TJs store in Pasadena, and began shopping at TJs in the '70s. I remember when they made fresh sandwiches and had these cool cheese counters where they cut bulk cheese into smaller retail packages. (Yes, I'm old.) Trader Joe's was THE go-to place for last minute party and picnic shopping, especially on the way to the beach.

I always loved TJs because it was funky and fun and high quality, with lots of inexpensive yummy wines (especially when I was a broke college student). And, they carried so many really hard-to-find specialty items at extraordinarily reasonable prices. Even after Joe sold out to the German company (can't remember the family's name), he continued to run the operation. We got a lot more stores and more variety in merchandise, but overall things stayed pretty much the same.

But he stepped out around 1990 or so, and I'm sorry to say the concept has been in steady decline ever since.

Nowadays, I can get virtually everything they sell at my "regular" shopping venues at comparable prices. It's just not worth a special trip across town anymore. It's no bargain (at least not for me), and the quality of the products just nowhere near what it used to be.

Of course, if I didn't have first hand knowledge of all those changes, or if I lived in an area where specialty items are hard to find, or where TJs prices were significantly better than other stores' prices, I'd probably still shop there. And I can see why it's neat for people who've never had access before. But, to me TJs has become all about hype and profit margins.

A real bummer, since it was my favorite store for such a long time.

My worst cooking disaster was technically a baking disaster. I was making key lime cheesecake bars, which sound delicious but which were HORRIBLE. Of course part of this was probably my fault because I forgot to shake up the key lime juice before adding it to the batter. The other parts that made it horrible include a pretzel crust and pistachio topping. I took a bite when they were ready and didn't like it but thought maybe my husband would still like it as he's less of a picky eater. When he got home he dug right in and then looked shocked. He couldn't decide whether to spit it out and risk offending me or to swallow it and deal with the pain. In the end, I told him it was OK if he didn't like them because I didn't either. We threw out the rest of the pan and vowed never to try that recipe again.

My oven had accumulated lots of little bits of food in the bottom over the months. I didn't realize how much had accumulated until I had 15 people over for a pizza party dinner and the fire alarm went off relentlessly. There was no way to turn it off because I live in a loft with 13 foot cielings. Everyone's ears were pierced and we had no dinner because there was no othher way to bake the pizzas!

That would be mashed potatoes. My little brother phoned halfway through the whipping process. After I came back to the pan, I thought I'd better add more milk as they seemed kind of thicker than usual. Wow, and kind of sticky. More milk. Erm, more glueish. Well, make lemonade, right? I scraped the potato mixture into a baking dish, dotted with a little butter, sprinkled paprika for a "this was intentional" look of Jacketless Twice Baked Potatoes. Um, after baking for 30 minutes, not so much. Instead, that would be wallpaper paste. Maybe spackle. Really REALLY hard to clean up, and certainly not edible. Nobody distracts me during mashed potato preparation anymore.

I cooked dinner for my dad and I a couple months before I got married. I was inspired to make home made bisquits. I pulled them out of the oven and they looked great, they just didn't raise at all. Undeterred, I put them in a basket and set them on the table when it was time to eat. I told my dad proudly that I made dinner all myself. He looked at the basket of bisquits and said "it looks like you made cookies for dessert"! We laughed when I told him that they were supposed to be light, fluffy bisquits!

I make awesome bisquits now and my dad and I still giggle!