"Now bring us some cut-price goodies..."

January is always a great time of year for picking up a few bargains in the supermarkets as they try to clear the shelves of the Christmas items they weren't able to shift. Now is the time to pick up excess boxes of mince pies for 50p or less (as long as you don't mind eating them well after the Christmas decorations have come down), or stock up ahead of next Christmas on things like mincemeat, marzipan and Christmas puddings, which might have Best Before dates during the summer, but will definitely still be fine come December.

You can also tell which of the weird and wonderful special edition Christmas foodstuffs failed to excite shoppers - last year, my local Sainsbury's was still trying to get rid of jars their own-brand Black Forest Mincemeat well into February, which were refusing to shift despite being reduced to just 20 pence a jar. I can't say that mincemeat with added chocolate appeals to me, so I didn't buy it even at that price. It looks like Tesco's Peanuts with a Pigs in Blankets-flavoured crunchy coating, and M&S's Turkey Gravy Mayonnaise are among the more unappetising items following suit this year.

Was £2.10, now 53p...but there's a lot to shift so there may well be further reductions

I suppose some of these limited edition products must be enjoyed by some, but you do have to wonder whether some of these flavour combinations have been dreamt up by teams who are either drunk, stoned, or just experiencing a massive sugar-rush from consuming all the leftover products from last year. Do they really think these creations are going to fly off the shelves before Christmas, when they are still at full price?

It's nice to see that this sort of thing isn't just a British eccentricity; in the USA, there seems to be the same, if not greater enthusiasm for special Christmas editions. One particular limited edition product  brought to my attention towards the end of 2022 was SPAM Figgy Pudding. This was not, you may be glad to hear, a Christmas pudding with SPAM in it, but rather tins of the famous pink meat, flavoured with "a blend of warm spices and seasonal ingredients that will be the star in many wintertime recipe favorites", which I think sounds marginally better, but not by much. It was, apparently, "born of a desire to reconnect diners with fond recollections of the days of Christmas yore", evoking "a sense of nostalgia and warmth", all of which sounds like complete and utter nonsense to me. 

Tin Years On - time for cake

 I return today to my blog, after another lengthy absence, for quite a momentous occasion. Click on the "About this Blog" link at the top of the page and it takes you through to my very first post, setting out why I decided to start all this madness. The date? 22nd December 2013.

I can't quite believe it's been ten years to the day, but then time does seem to increasingly fly by the older you get, doesn't it? The ever-longer gaps between my posts are testament to that, though my laziness and ever-diminishing attention span are probably more to blame. I was quite surprised though to see that I have clocked up 141 posts in that time, working out at more than one a month. It's not at all impressive compared to those people who write their blogs every day, but it's certainly more than I can remember writing. 

10 tins...10 years

Vivat! Vivat Sultana! (with curried beans)

May always feels like a short month to me, with the two Bank Holidays at the start and end giving us a couple of 4-day working weeks. This year it's been made to feel even shorter, with the extra Bank Holiday thrown in on account of the King's Coronation. It was a little unnecessary really, given that all the pomp and ceremony took place on a Saturday, but a third short week of work is not to be sniffed at - so thanks very much Charlie, much appreciated.

The only slight downside to Bank Holidays is that quite a lot of shops either aren't open, or are on reduced hours. No big deal, but it's easy to forget that when you're enjoying a day off - just as I did on the evening of the extra Bank Holiday for the Coronation. Returning home later than expected after an afternoon pub session, I found myself in the terrible situation of a) being quite hungry, b) having nothing very substantial in the fridge, and c) the shops being shut by then. I suppose I could have gone back out for dinner, or ordered a takeaway, but that always feels a bit of a cop out, and I thought I should at least try to throw something together at home. It was on inspecting the various leftovers in Tupperware pots in the fridge, and discovering that I had about half a tin of cheap Tesco baked beans, and just under half a tin of a possibly even cheaper Tesco chicken curry (from their value range), that I realised I had the basis for a meal fit for a king.

Bid now to keep the bean museum going!

If you're a baked bean fan, I've got some good news and some bad news.

Bad news first: the Baked Bean Museum of Excellence in Port Talbot, South Wales, is closing. I know, I know. It's hard to hear.

The good news? The entire collection is up for sale on eBay, so - if you move quickly - you could take it on yourself and stop the museum from becoming a has-bean (sorry).

The museum is the brainchild of one Barry Kirk, who in 2009 opened up his own council flat to the public to showcase his rapidly growing collection of baked bean memorabilia, and indeed his love of the little orange beauties.

Christmas Dinner Soup, free of meat (and gloop)

We're now three weeks into 2023, but while the year is no longer really new, I feel it's still just about ok to tell you about a few things I ate over the festive period. Compared to my last post, talking about the Queen's Jubilee some 7 months after it happened, this is almost instantaneous reportage.

Regular readers may recall that in December 2021, I was 'lucky' enough to get my hands on a limited edition tin of Christmas Dinner Big Soup from Heinz, which brought together all your favourite bits of the traditional feast in a sea of gravy. To say I wasn't massively impressed by it would be a bit of an understatement, so when Heinz announced that they would be bringing it back in 2022, I wasn't all that fussed. Well, that's not quite true - I was slightly miffed actually, as this time they were going to be selling it selected branches of Asda, rather than only via their own website, which had meant you had no choice but to pay the postage cost, pushing the price up to around an extortionate £5 (though from memory it did include a donation to a homeless charity, so I musn't grumble.)

The other big change for 2022 was that Heinz also brought out a vegan version, but again I wasn't massively bothered - I am many things, but a vegan is not one of them. One day in late November however, I just so happened to find myself in a large Asda, where they had a good number of tins of the stuff (contrary to reports I'd heard that they were very hard to find anywhere), so I thought I might as well give it a try, as something to write about for a Christmas-themed post, if nothing else. And as I'm writing that post very late, I'm killing two birds with one stone, as this will do for Veganuary too. 

Jubilant Oranges and Lemons

After a flurry of posts in December 2021, I well and truly failed in 2022. I managed just the one post at the start of the year, then a whole 12 months passed by, and now 2023 is here. Was I so ridiculously busy that I didn't have a spare moment to put pen to paper, or finger to key? No, of course not. I am just useless, and achieved very little all round last year. By contrast, in the real world, a great deal happened. Here in the UK we had four Chancellors, three prime ministers, two monarchs and an Accidental Partridge in a pair of shorts in the "I'm A Celebrity" jungle. 

In my defence, I did manage a couple of half-written posts, but got no further with them than that. I took advantage of the extra Bank Holiday given to us for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and made a decent stab at a post related to the celebrations, but I didn't finish it, the summer flew by, and then after her death in September, it felt like I might have missed the boat. Just goes to show, you should always strike while the iron is hot.

But with more time having now passed, it feels a little less weird to be returning to the subject of that post, so I hope it will not be felt inappropriate to anyone. Given that I'm writing this the week that Prince Harry's autobiography comes out, I think fans of the Royal Family will have enough to get upset about anyway.

A grape way to start a new year

 A very Happy New Year to all, whether regular readers of this blog, or just passing visitors.

I hope you all managed to enjoy some celebrations of some kind to see in 2022, even if, for the second year running, they weren't quite as you might have wanted them to be. While it is always sad when traditions observed at annual celebrations with family and friends are forced to change or be missed, it makes them all the more special when you do get to do them again. Fingers crossed for a return to a normal Christmas and New Year in a little under 12 months' time.

Talking of traditions, in Spain, there is a special way of seeing in the New Year by eating a grape on each chime of the clock as it rings out for midnight, to bring good luck in the year ahead. Each of the grapes represents a month in the coming year.

I had heard of the tradition before, but didn't really appreciate quite how widespread a custom it was in Spain until noticing on the food-sharing app OLIO that someone had listed some tins of grapes to give away.