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.