When is a tin not a tin?

Answer: When it's a tube.

Let me explain. Some time ago, I was browsing the chilled food aisle of my local supermarket (yes, I do occasionally eat things that don't come out of tins) when my attention was caught by a tin on one of the refrigerator shelves. My initial thought was that it was something left there by one of those people who pick up an item, change their mind half way round the shop and then deposit it on a shelf wherever they happen to be at the time, the rogues. But no - there were a number of the same tins on the shelf - the product had clearly been stacked there intentionally. But what reason could there be for keeping tins in a fridge? The whole point of them is that they keep food preserved at ambient temperature.

Rather deer for a tinned ready meal

The A&B Roll wasn't the only tin I brought back from Scotland, or indeed the only interesting Grant's product I found up there. The company portfolio is larger than I initially thought; in addition its various tinned haggis products, it has a 'traditional' range of meat-based ready meals (stews, casseroles, curries and so on), a 'catering' range featuring much larger tins, and a 'gourmet' range of fancier versions of some of the above - "delicious meals produced with the finest quality, locally sourced ingredients", which won 'Top Product Launch' in The Grocer Awards 2011.

The tins retail for around £3, which is certainly high-end pricing for a tinned ready meal. I was lucky enough to find a tin of Venison Casserole reduced to clear down to £1.49 in a Tesco in Edinburgh, which was a little more reasonable. I wondered whether they were trying to get rid of the tins as they weren't selling well; it was only when I got home that I realised that in fact the tin had already passed its best before date by a few months, so shouldn't have been on sale at all.

Still, such a trivial matter as a historical date has never put me off trying tins before, and the idea of a luxury item like venison in a tin appealed to me so much that it there was no question of it doing so this time.

So - to the kitchen! "Lean chunks of venison in a delicious meaty gravy with vegetables", the label promised. Opening the tin, it certainly looked like a rich, unctuous sauce, so I had high hopes as I waited for it to heat through in the pan.

Roll with it, Scotland!

It's more than a month now since the Scottish people, faced with their biggest political decision in living memory, decided not to turn their backs on 300 years of history and become independent, but to remain part of the UK.

What had seemed initially like an idea that would never take flight - no doubt why the government agreed to a referendum in the first place - ended up being nail-bitingly close, with the 'Yes' campaign gathering more and more momentum as the referendum approached, and the three main party leaders looking increasingly worried, decamping to Edinburgh to give pleading speeches to convince Scottish people not to leave them. But in the end they said no, Westminster breathed a sigh of relief, Salmond resigned, and the Queen purred. Allegedly.

What has this got to do with tins? Nothing really, but I myself was north of the border over the summer, both in Edinburgh for the festival and later on visiting relatives in the Highlands, so naturally during that time I spent a while perusing various shops for local tins of interest, and came home with a couple of corkers, including this one, which even has its own smart tartan label.

 

This week's big (tin) opening

A new 'pop-up' restaurant set up shop in Soho this week. Hardly the most exciting of news items, is it? With so many places to eat and drink either springing up or fizzling out around town, whether intentionally temporary or not, it's not really news at all. No sooner has one restaurant or bar opened and become so popular that the queues for a table stretch down the street and round the corner, than another opens round said corner, and those at the back of the queue for the first place find themselves at the front of the queue of the second. This week's opening probably won't attract such huge crowds, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the most important and exciting new venture of the year, if not the decade. The unique selling point of the place? It serves tinned fish. And nothing else.

Who knew the world of tinned food could be so topical?

While it might have been a better article if produced by the likes of Private Eye or The Onion, I was quite amused by the following spoof article, which featured in the Sunday Sport yesterday (or so Twitter informs me; I certainly don't read the paper myself!):

Pop down to The Cornershop

Some time ago I wrote about a project called The Cornershop, for which the artist Lucy Sparrow was seeking funding through Kickstarter to enable her to open an old-fashioned corner shop, of the kind which are sadly few and far between these days, but with all the items on sale made out of felt.

She managed to raise over £10,000 in donations, vastly exceeding her initial £2000 goal. I made a contribution myself, which entitled me to my very own soft tin in advance of the shop's opening. After getting in touch with Lucy and telling her all about my blog, and she very kindly offered to make me a special tin of corned beef - seen here in my kitchen, alongside a real tin. I like the fact that due to the stuffing inside it, it looks like it's bulging slightly, as if it's been languishing on the shelves of a corner shop for far too long.

Lucy spent seven months stitching together hundreds of items for the shop, which opened last Friday in a long-since closed premises just off Columbia Road in east London.

Kheer today...kheer tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that...

Last Monday was Eid al-Fitr, celebrated by Muslims around the world as the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. The name literally translates as "festival of breaking of the fast", but it is also given other more informal names such as the Sugar Feast and the Sweet Festival, as traditionally desserts and sweet treats form an important part of the celebrations. I was suddenly reminded of the fact that it must therefore have been over a year since I bought this tin of kheer, an Indian style rice pudding, from Tesco, as it had been on offer during Ramadan last year. Or perhaps it was even two years ago - it had already passed its best-before date, which would be quite a short shelf life for a tin if only a year old. Not only that, but like the corned beef hash from a few weeks ago, the product is no longer stocked by Tesco at all. So, if you read this and fancy trying it yourself, I'm afraid you can't any more. Sorry. I really do need to get my skates on with regards to trying these tins and blogging about them, rather than just buying them and leaving them to gather dust in the cupboard.

SPAMabit more

I still had quite a bit of the tin of SPAM with Real Bacon left after the popcorn experiment, so was keen to try out some other recipes to use up the rest of it. I made a tea in my SPAM mug (which I bought a few years back from a car boot sale in Wimbledon for truly bargainous 20p), fired up the laptop and got Googling for ideas.

One of the places I frequently turn to first for inspiration is the fantastic blog Food Stories, whose author Helen Graves has a huge passion for cooking and experimenting with food, and an appetite that more than matches it in size. I love the jokey, irreverent style of her writing, and the fact that she tags quite a few of her recipes as 'guilty pleasures', yet you get the feeling she doesn't really feel that guilty about them at all, cooking, eating and writing about whatever she feels like.

I think I have yet to read one of her recipes that doesn't leave me wanting to try it myself, and I still have dreams about the epic Boston Baked Beans which I once made from her recipe. Equally, her photos and descriptions of the food she tries on her travels have added a quite a few previously unconsidered locations to my list of places I want to visit - Lebanon, Georgia and Ethiopia to name but three.

I was reminded of a post on the blog from some time ago, when Helen had been asked by Hormel, the makers of SPAM, to come up with a recipe using their prized pork product. She responded in typically innovative and witty fashion with the 'SPAM mi', her take on bánh mì, the classic Vietnamese baguette-style sandwich, replacing the usual minced or sliced pork, sausage or meat pate with SPAM. Genius.

And now for something largely the same...despite the added bacon

Fans of classic comedy will no doubt be aware that the five remaining members of Monty Python recently reunited for a series of live shows at the O2, the first time the team had performed together onstage for 30 years. Given that they have a combined age of 361, it seems likely that this will be the last occasion too (unless they are still short of money to pay for their various legal bills and divorce settlements, in which case the Monty Python cash cow might get another milking yet).

I wasn't at all surprised to learn that the shows sold out in a matter of minutes, but while it would have been a great experience to have been there, I wasn't hugely disappointed, given the crazy prices of the tickets, and the fact that the O2 is a cavernous hole of a venue. When it was later decided that the final show would be broadcast into cinemas across the world though, I jumped at the opportunity and bought a ticket straight away, feeling pleased with myself that I had only paid £15 as opposed to many times that amount, and would most likely get a better view than those seeing it live. And then of course it was announced that it would be being shown on television anyway on Gold, putting an end to my smugness.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable evening's entertainment; not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but I don't think anyone had expectations in terms of new material - the show was always going to be very much a final revisit of the most famous sketches, a little like going to see an ageing rock band do their last 'greatest hits' concert.

"Spam, spam, spam, spam..."

I feel an occasion like this demands recognition in some way though, and given that one of Python's best-loved routines features a certain brand of tinned meat product, it seems only right therefore that I write a post about...SPAM. You couldn't really say that the sketch champions SPAM as such, but it has certainly done much to seal it within the public's consciousness - indeed, it is the sketch's suggestion that SPAM is ubiquitous yet unwanted that years later led to it giving its name to the emails that clog up inboxes across the globe.

#disappointing

I have been meaning to do a Brazil-themed post in honour of the World Cup host nation since the tournament began way back in June. Recent weeks have passed me by in a flash though, and now it really is all over following Deutschland's triumph over Argentina on Sunday night. 

While they may have put on an excellent championships, the Brazilians are still licking their wounds after that complete and utter trouncing in the semi-finals by the Germans, and their third place play-off match against the Netherlands where they barely did much better. They really did make a complete and utter hash of their later matches...so, given that Brazil is one of the largest exporters of beef and related products, including a significant proportion of the corned beef shipped and sold around the world, it only seems appropriate therefore to mark their defeat with the classic corned beef hash.

Proof that it does indeed come from Brazil

NOT available from your local Tesco

I won't be hashing up any prime Brazilian corned beef myself though, because did you know you can actually buy tins of ready-made CBH? What a world we live in. Well, I say you can buy tins of it - perhaps 'could' would be more correct - I got this tin from Tesco a few months back now, but they seem to have stopped selling it now. I assume it's just a discontinued line rather than something Seara have stopped making - otherwise I may be inadvertently opening and eating a collectors' item. Or maybe not.

Beans means points and points mean...prizes!

At the checkout at Sainsbury’s yesterday, I was rewarded with this voucher offering me 60 bonus Nectar points when I spend £1.60 on canned fruit, vegetables and beans before 28^th July.

Just a coincidence that they should give this voucher to a tin cannoisseur, of course – I’m sure Sainsbury’s would never dream of using my customer spending data to look at what I have been buying recently and then try to tailor their offers and deals accordingly...

Frankly a money-off voucher wouId have been nicer, as I never really think to redeem Nectar points, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers. 60 points is worth 30p, apparently, which if I ever get round to using would buy me a 198g tin of Sainsbury's Basics Sweetcorn in Water, with five pence to spare. "All sizes, juicy and sweet", it says on the tin. So, rewards are indeed sweeter with Nectar. But slightly saltier too, given that they have salt as well as sugar added to the water.

Catch this if you can...

This weekend is your absolute last chance to get to see The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, the latest promenade-style theatre production by Punchdrunk, the doyens of immersive theatrical experiences. If you're quick, there may be a handful of tickets left, bookable here through the National Theatre's website. They don't come cheap, but I can assure you it will be worth every penny.

Wearing carnival-style masks to maintain their anonymity, audience members are left to wander at their own will around the four floors of an abandoned building next to Paddington station, which has been transformed into a mysterious 1960s Los Angeles film complex named Temple Studios. As the NT website says, "Your curiosity is key. The more you explore, the richer your experience will be. Delve in, be bold, and immerse yourself".

The show is a reworking of Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck, brought forward to the 20th century to explore "the darkness of the Hollywood dream, where celluloid fantasy meets desperate reality, and certainty dissolves into a hallucinatory world". As you roam around the building, you may only catch snippets of scenes and glimpses of characters, but your experience will be no less astonishing for that. You may be fortunate enough to be taken aside by one of the characters for a unique one-on-one experience.

And if you are really lucky, and a little cheeky, you may even leave with a tin of peas.

Intrigued? You'll have to catch one of the remaining performances and explore yourself to find out more...

http://punchdrunk.com/

Alternative uses for tins no.2

On a recent visit to Newcastle, I spotted this innovative use of tins in the most unlikely of locations - a shoe shop, to show off their stock to better effect.

I didn't ask the sales staff what was actually in the tins themselves, but Scorpio Shoes have been quite creative in making their own labels with a Heinz-style layout on the front ("50 countries worldwide" replacing "57 varieties"), a list of all the brands of shoe they sell in the 'Ingredients' section on the back, and the following paragraph under 'Dietary Information':

"Suitable for the fashionably late. Definitely contains nuts! Not suitable for those with an intolerance to creativity and individuality. Please consult your wallet if you experience a desire to purchase."

Unique, memorable and a bit of fun - it's the sort of nice little touch that smaller independent companies do so well. Whether Heinz would be be particurlarly amused if they found out remains to be seen, but maybe Scorpio could win them over by telling them that all the tins contain Heinz beans, and that they wouldn't dream of using anything else in their stores - whether or not that's actually true!

World Cup success still pie in the sky for England

With the 2014 World Cup in Brazil now entering its latter stages, it feels an awfully long time since England were knocked out, following extremely disappointing performances in their first two matches against Italy and Uruguay. Not knowing much about football, I can't offer much more comment than that. I had though Italy were supposed to be fairly good, so that defeat was perhaps inevitable; as for the Uruguayan team, I know that one of their players sometimes gets a bit peckish out on the pitch, but I have absolutely no idea whether they're considered to be a decent side and hence whether we should have done better or not.

In fact I can't really say that I know all that much about Uruguay as a country either - I might just about be able to place them on a map of South America, but I couldn't tell you what their flag looks like, or even what the capital is. I can, however, name another place in the country - the city of Fray Bentos. You can probably tell where I'm going with this already.

There ain't no [fruit] flies on this...

Talking of produce that is at its best at the moment, this time of year is also prime season for imported mangoes. The many Asian supermarkets in the part of London I live in usually have crateloads of the fruits stacked up inside and out around this time, neatly packed in shredded paper in boxes of half a dozen or a dozen. You will often find a range of varieties on offer, but many people consider the Alphonso mango from India to be the finest. Named after Afonso de Alberquerque, a nobleman and military expert who helped establish the Portuguese colony in India, it is "one of the most heavenly of all edible things", according to our dear friend Mr Ottolenghi. And he feels much the same way about smoked oysters too, so clearly I'm not going to refute his claim.

An Alphonso mango. Photo NOT taken this year.

Lend me your spears

I can't believe it's June already - 2014 appears to be shooting by in a flash. The weather doesn't quite seem able to believe it either, or at least can't make its mind up as to what time of year it really is and what it's supposed to be doing - several times in the last few weeks I've found myself getting drenched one day and almost sunburnt the next - sometimes even on the same day. It's always a funny time of year though, this - Midsummer's Day is less than a week a way, but summer as we know it (or would like to know it) feels some way off yet. But it also feels a bit late to call it spring. Sprummer, maybe?

Call it what you will, but with the weeks passing so quickly, the all-too-short period when veg like asparagus and Jersey Royals are in season and at their best will soon be over. If only we were able to enjoy them for more of the year, without them having been flown over from the other side of the world... Well hold on to your horses for a minute, because maybe we can. Yep, you guessed it - both asparagus and Jersey Royals are available all year round from a tinned food aisle near you. Could they be as good as the fresh produce currently brightening up the displays of markets (whether of the super- or farmers' variety) up and down the country? Almost certainly not, but I was damned if I wasn't going to give them a try.

"O CANada..."

My recent travels for work and pleasure sadly didn't take me as far afield as Canada - but if they had, I would definitely have tried to pay a visit to Vancouver Canstruction, which was taking place at several locations across the city earlier this month. The premise behind the event is simple: "teams of architects, engineers, designers and schools get together to CANstruct fantastic, giant sized sculptures made entirely out of canned food", as their website states. The photos on the site don't really do the sculptures justice in my opinion, so if you can bear a visit to the Daily Mail website (which appears to be the only UK news site which featured the event), you can see some of the creations in all their glory. This one of a Lego spaceman is my favourite:

Take a tin of steak and make a bake (which may look fake)

From Birmingham I carried on north to Glasgow, not for work but a fleeting visit for a friend's surprise 30th birthday. It was my first time in the city, but hopefully not the last, as it really was rather nice indeed.

Two things I noticed which I feel compelled to tell you about - firstly, tinned haggis is far more readily available than it is south of the border. Unsurprising you might think, but I would have expected the Scots to eschew the tinned variety in favour of the real thing. As it was, just about every supermarket or convenience shop I went into had at least one brand on its shelves. Secondly, I don't think I have ever seen so many branches of Greggs the Bakers in one place. There seemed to be one on every other road I walked down, and sometimes more than one, much like the Starbucks, Costas and Pret a Mangers that line and litter the streets of London. Look at this map of their locations from Greggs' website - the centre of Glasgow is a veritable sea of G's.

What would the Man from Del Monte say to this?

On a recent trip to Birmingham for work, I happened upon this piece of street art on the wall of a building a short distance north of New Street Station.

Although more than a little faded and peeling, if you stop to look it is still recognisable as a tin of Del Monte fruit "In It's Own Juice" (shame about the apostrophe), with a mass of skulls arranged in the shape of a bunch of grapes on the label. A comment on Del Monte's human rights record, perhaps?

Squibs and squids

All that talk of Canned Food Week being a damp squib has had me thinking a lot about squid. That's the way my mind works, you see.

It just so happened that a few weeks back I bought a tin of Tesco Finest* Squid Pieces in Salsa Piccante, as it was on offer at the time. That isn't an asterisk after "Finest" by the way - it's just a star that Tesco have incorporated into their logo for the range, for no real reason.* So, with squid on the brain, now seems like the perfect time to give it a try. The tin says it's perfect for tapas; I just fancy a light snack so decide just to serve it up on toast - a single tapa, if you will.

The most exciting week of the tinned food year?

A number of my posts so far have attempted to mark various occasions or happenings of note with a culinary experiment of some kind involving a tinned food product. This week though, the dining tables are turned, as it is tinned foods themselves that will be celebrated with their very own seven-day event. That’s right – from Monday 14th to Sunday 20th April, the humble tin will be getting the recognition it deserves during Canned Food Week. Apologies for not having let you know sooner.

Beanie record breakers and incredible art makers

With the news having been somewhat dominated of late by missing aeroplanes, the Ukraine crisis and various other doom and gloom items, it's quite easy to miss some of the lighter but no less important stories of the moment.

Last week for example, in the humble environs of Haddon Hall Baptist Church on Tower Bridge Road, comedian Rob Thomas broke the Guinness World Record for the number of baked beans eaten in three minutes with a cocktail stick.

Wearing a beanie hat for good luck, he set the new record at 159 beans eaten - just seven more than the previous record set in Jamaica some years ago, so it must have been a pretty nail-biting thing to watch. But did we hear anything about it in the main news, or even the local news? Not a sausage. It was only by chance I found out about it, and I just knew you'd all be very excited to hear the news too. Here's a video of the feat.

And, while we're on the subject of beans...here's an amazing timelapse video of artist Marcello Barenghi drawing an incredibly realistic tin of beans (and various other food and drink items).

So there you have it: two bean-related items of interest for the price of none - surely proof that it's not all doom and gloom, whatever the news night lead you to believe.

I-rish I'd had a bigger lunch

Ah,  St Patrick's Day -  a day on which, as tradition now dictates, people with little or no Irish heritage flock to their nearest watering hole and attempt to claim a free Guinness hat by consuming copious pints of the Emerald Isle's best known tipple.

I had no desire to join the throngs last Monday evening, instead opting to mark the occasion at home, with some traditional Irish fare. Or rather, a tin of Sainsbury's "basics" Irish Stew.

Jamaican' me hungry

Following on from the Winter Olympics, the Winter Paralympics are currently in full swing in Sochi. In a previous post I touched on some of the controversy surrounding the Games, but let’s cast all that aside for now. Both the Games have been hugely successful for Team GB with a record number of medals being won, but for me, even that pales into irrelevance. I will never be able to think about the Winter Olympics without the cinematic classic that is Cool Runnings coming to mind, charting the true-life trials and tribulations of the Jamaican bobsleigh team as they struggle to train, qualify and compete at their first Games in Calgary, 1988.

Partly in their honour (but mainly as I’d had the tins sitting in my cupboard  for ages) I decided it was time to try out that Jamaican classic, saltfish and ackees.

A passion that cannot be contained...a passionfruit that shouldn't be tin-canned.

Of course, it would be wrong to end a romantic Valentine's Day meal without a naughty dessert, even if you are eating alone. Keen to think of something tin-based to follow my oysters, I did a search for appropriate puddings, for which there were chocolatey suggestions a-plenty, but one ingredient which kept coming up in recipes was, of course, the passion fruit. Could that be found in tinned form?

Not with any great ease in the UK, it seemed. While John West do produce a tin of passionfruit pulp in syrup, this is only available in Australia, and with the sad demise of the Australia Shop in Covent Garden last year, it looked like it was going to be difficult to find a tin without a fairly hefty price-tag for buying it online. However, Amazon was listing a small tin of granadilla pulp (the South African name for passionfruit), with the following customer review:

Singles are cheaper with Oyster(s in a tin)

If any of you spent a small fortune taking your loved one out for champagne and oysters on Valentine’s Day, or hours in the kitchen grappling with the shells yourself for a romantic home-cooked dinner, or ended up with food poisoning after eating a dodgy one, you might want to stop reading now. It all could have been so much cheaper, easier and less messy if you'd gone down the tinned route. Yes, that's right - good old John West has come up trumps again, with Smoked Oysters in a tin, selling at around £1.99 for 85g.

Taste the Rainbow

7th February saw the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. While they should really be all about the sports and celebrating the astonishing achievements of humans in their chosen fields, the Olympics have often found themselves bogged down in politics, and these Games in particular have been caught up in a huge amount of controversy surrounding Russia’s attitude towards and treatment of gay people.

Subsequently there have been protests, boycotts, speeches and a number of small but nonetheless high-profile acts of solidarity, such as companies altering their logos to incorporate rainbows, including Channel 4, The Guardian and Google with one of its famous ‘Google doodles’. 

 

I decided to do my bit in what felt like the most appropriate way - by baking some rainbow cakes. In tins. The idea is simple - first, make up a basic pale cake batter.

Sins in tins?

An amusing little article here from today's Observer Food Monthly magazine, in which seven top chefs reveal their guilty food pleasures. Two of them go for food from tins - Nathan Outlow has a secret penchant for tinned hot dogs, while Simon Hopkinson is never without Farrow's Marrowfat Peas in his kitchen. Elsewhere in the issue, there is a fantastic article from the great Nigel Slater, in which he describes the thought process behind these guilty feasts, and reveals his own secret love of Big Macs - who'd have thought it?!

I shall be posting about both tins in due course. Personally though I would never see tinned foods as a 'guilty' pleasure - if I did, I'd have an awful lot of skeletons in my cupboards...

Cornering the market in cuddly tins

Another day, another artist doing something tin-related. I heard about this project through the crowd-funding website Kickstarter, which artist Lucy Sparrow is using to raise sufficient capital to set up "The Cornershop" later this year.

Lucy describes herself as a textiles artist, working "mainly with felt and wool creating over-sized soft versions of existing objects and major art works." The idea behind her current project is to take over an abandoned cornershop in East London and re-open it, stocked entirely with felt versions of the products you would normally expect to be able to buy.

Sichuan Pork: A-salted and battered

The recent Chinese New Year celebrations cajoled me into finally opening the somewhat beaten-up looking tin of Sichuan Pork that I picked up a while back from the reduced shelf in my local Tesco. I say somewhat beaten-up - in fact it looked far more dented than a simple drop on the floor could ever have caused; drop-kicked seemed more likely from the size of the divots in its sides. Given its state you'd think it might have been a bit more reduced than £2 down to 80p. Still, tins are generally still fine to use when it is just the sides that are dented; it wasn't rusted at all, or bulging at the top or bottom, nor did it make a popping sound when pressed at the ends (a sign that the seal has been broken) or spray its contents everywhere when opened, so I felt it was safe to proceed. Note how I slipped in a little food safety lesson there - it's educational stuff, this blog, innit.

Alternative uses for tins no.1

Take one small, empty food tin. Remove the bottom of the tin to create a shallow tube or ring.

So hungry I could eat a...small tin of pasta shapes

Just over a year on from the horsemeat scandal, when traces of horse were found to be present in low-grade meat products, including burgers, ready meals and even some tinned foods, there is a pleasing irony to the fact that you can still buy tins of My Little Pony pasta shapes in tomato sauce.

 

Some hae meat and CANna eat...

While I can't lay claim to any Scottish heritage (or at least am not aware of having any), I am partial to a bit of haggis, and have in the past served it up around the time of Burns Night with the traditional neeps and tatties - and whisky too, naturally. I might not have bothered again this year, had it not been for spotting some time ago that Waitrose actually stock Grant's tinned haggis all year round in most of their branches, in addition to the fresh haggises (or should that be haggai? Oh no, wait - that's a book from the Bible) which gain prominence in their chiller cabinets towards the end of January. A snip at just 99p for 220g, I couldn't resist giving the tinned version a whirl.

 

A tin fit for a queen?

Back in June last year, the Queen celebrated 60 years since her coronation - an altogether more low-key affair than her Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012, when even food manufacturers were producing limited edition versions of their packaging - but no less worthy of some kind of commemoration.

A limited edition 'Jubilee' tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup

Tinned Play-Doh Pope Portraits. No, really.

A link here to the excellent site Design Taxi, which looks at all things arty and design-y. This is a post from a while back about Berlin-based artist Miriam Jonas, who sculpts detailed portaits of popes out of Play-Doh in fish tin cans. Of course she does. You wonder why more people don't do the same.

Get Well Soup

Heinz are very up on their social media it seems - not only do they have a Facebook page for their Baked Beanz, as mentioned in my last post, but they have one for their tinned soups as well. Usually it's fairly mundane stuff that they post on the page, trying to drum up interest in products that are available all year round (one discussion topic they started recently was "What do you like to dunk in your soup the most - bread, or toast?". The replies were thrilling, as you can imagine.) But at the moment they're being a bit innovative, and jumping on the fact that at this time of year pretty much everyone knows someone who has a cold (or worse), you can currently buy a tin of either tomato or chicken soup (arguably the most comforting of flavours) with a personalised label saying "Get Well Soon, ... ", delivered directly to the door of your loved one. Admittedly it will set you back £3.99 (the RRP of a standard can is 75p), but that includes P&P and a £1 donation to the children's charity Starlight, "to help fund Starlight Storytellers, who spend time and read stories with poorly children in UK hospitals to make them feel better". 

Here's the link to the page.

And if you don't want to part with your hard-earned cash for a good cause/marketing gimmick, you can post a 'virtual tin' on a friend's Facebook page instead, which is what I suspect most people will opt for (if they bother at all). Souper.

Bake(d) Five

Heinz launched their new “Five Beanz” baked beans on 10th June 2012. I know this for a fact, as they proudly announced the product’s first birthday on their Facebook page in June 2013. Yes, Heinz Beanz really do have their own Facebook page. And I am almost embarrassed to say that I “like” it, to use the social network’s own terminology. It was this notification, as well as a resurgence in the company’s advertising of the product around the same time, which prompted me to give them a try.