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.