Trader Joe's Gingerbread Spice Granola

Thanksgiving wiped me out y'all. I quite like the gatherings and festivities and delicious delights, but after days straight of eating eating and eating, I'm wiped out. I need a salad. Oh wait. It's safer to eat fries than salad at the moment, or so some people say (it's really not that dangerous as long as you can identify the origin of the lettuce!). In any event, I may or may not have eaten fries for post-work breakfast. Oh well...we'll go back to healthier things tomorrow, don't we all say that? Onto some granola. 

Granola stands this ambiguous ground between health food (people who think it's healthy) and a treat yoself food (people who know it's not actually that healthy). It's ironic because "granola crunchy" holds this connotation of being super healthy, environmentally conscious, hipsterism, etc. when the product itself is not THAT healthy. But whatever. I eat it for taste. TJ's has reliably delicious granola, my preference being the just the clusters series.  And thank you cold weather - it brings on seasonal flavors of granola. Bring on the gingerbread! Unlike pumpkin spice, I quite like gingerbread. But even then, I don't think I would want every possible product to be flavored with gingerbread spices. More is not better y'all.

The ingredients are pretty good- solid ingredients I could find for the most part in a grocery store. Heck, might as well make my own gingerbread granola - can't be that difficult - but they say Trader Joe's is great for people who like food but don't want to cook. TJ's will get ya about 2/3 of the way there. 

I have tried "warm granola" before with the pumpkin spice granola and while it is tasty, I prefer it plain and/or with milk to optimize the crunch. It goes without saying that the prerequisite for liking this granola is an affinity for gingerbread. Thus A was so not interested. This granola has pretty good flavor - gingery without being too spicy, sweet without being too sweet, and balanced with the other spices. There are candied ginger pieces throughout but not an overwhelming amount, which would make the granola perhaps too gingery. There's a decent amount of clusters - of course I would love for there to be more but this is a standard granola and another ginger-flavored just the cluster granola already exists (please please don't purchase on amazon. Price inflation y'all). I sort of wish the pecans were a bit more candied, like the candied pecans you can buy by the bag, but overall it's a solid granola, and if I were too lazy to make this myself (and better customize the candied pecan content, granola cluster sizes and amounts, etc) I'd definitely repurchase. Lest we forget, $2.99 for a specialty seasonal holiday granola is still a good deal. And maybe gingerbread tastes better precisely because we don't eat it year round. Does fasting from it for half the year increase its objective value? Perhaps perhaps.

TL;DR: Trader Joe's Gingerbread Spice Granola. Gingerbread breakfast in a bowl. Solid. More candied pecans please. 7.5 out of 10.