The Christmas Special: Part Two

GAME's 'Christmas Tinner' did get me thinking though - while it wasn't going to be possible for me to try a Christmas dinner all in one tin, what about a Christmas dinner made from tins? Each element of the meal could be a tinned product of some kind. I already had some of the necessary items in my stash of tins, and a quick trip to a couple of local supermarkets (plus a not-so-local shop selling imported American food products) provided the rest of the bill of fare. I should probably point out though that this was a pre-Christmas feast - I didn't attempt to force what follows onto my family on the day itself. That would certainly have made for a memorable Christmas, but for all the wrong reasons...

First up - the vegetables. No Christmas dinner would be complete without some lovely crispy roast potatoes, carrots and parsnips. Sadly I wasn't able to find tinned parsnips, other than as a soup, so those had to be dropped from the menu, but potatoes and carrots were much easier to come by. The potatoes were a tin of Tesco Everyday Value New Potatoes in Water, which had been heavily dented, and hence reduced to even less then its already incredibly low price. The carrots were Sainsbury's standard Whole Carrots in Water. I tried both straight from their respective tins and can honestly say I wasn't much impressed by either, with the little spuds being almost soap-like in texture and the whole (but disappointingly short) carrots seemingly boiled to within an inch of their life, leaving them without any bite to them at all, and only the faintest hint of a carrotty flavour. Still - perhaps a good roasting would improve them somehow. I drained both, tipped them into a tray, gave it a shake to rough up their edges, drizzled them with a little oil, salt and rosemary, and hoped for the best.

Next, the sprouts. I had been quite surprised to find them in tinned form, as sprouts have such a bad reputation that I couldn't imagine there would be a big enough market for them. These ones were made by the French company D'aucy - "France's Favourite Vegetables!", as the label proclaims. I am a big fan of the little brassicas, and find myself each year extolling their virtues to non-believers, trying to get them to realise that as long as you don't boil the life out of them, they can be incredibly tasty. I think it is safe to say though that if you are trying to convert someone to becoming a sprout lover, tinned is not the way to go. Think of the most overdone, soggiest brussels sprouts you have ever eaten - then imagine putting them back into the pan a day later and boiling them again for another hour. That's what tinned sprouts are like.

I used a knife to spear one through the middle and remove it from the tin, but it was so soft its own weight was sufficient for it to slide off the blade, cleaving itself in two. The smell on opening the tin was actually quite unpleasant - again, somehow sproutier than the sproutiest specimens I've ever had the misfortune to smell. Brussels sprouts can be mini wind-machines at the best of times too, but even before eating them I dreaded to think of the effect they would have on my digestive system. I can't believe they actually eat these at all in France, but just ship them over to us instead as some kind of cruel joke.

Seeing as they had already been boiled to within an inch of their life, if not beyond, I decided the best thing to do with them would be to heat them through in a pan with a little butter - everything is better with a little butter, after all. I should really have left it at that, but then as we usually do our sprouts with chestnuts at Christmas, I thought it might be a good idea to add a spoonful of the tin of chestnut puree I'd found some time ago. You can buy sweetened chestnut purees, but this one from Merchant Gourmet was just roasted and pureed chestnuts, suitable for use "in everything from stuffings, soups and sauces to baking and desserts". The idea was that a small amount would create a sort of sauce with the butter to coat the sprouts. This just about worked, but given that the chestnut puree was a rather dull greyish-brown in colour, it managed to make the sprouts look even more unappetising than they already were.

One item whose absence would cause a mutiny at the Christmas table is pigs in blankets. I had to cheat here slightly; while there is a whole range of sausages available in tins, bacon is somewhat harder to come by, so I had to resort to using real bacon from a packet to wrap around my sausages, which were mini 'Party Hot Dogs' from the Ye Olde Oak brand. One thing that I hadn't realised about tinned sausages is that in general they are made mostly from chicken rather than pork. Not just any chicken though, but "mechanically separated" chicken. I don't know what that involves, and I'm not sure I want to either. In fact it's probably best not to examine the label of these products in too much detail, to avoid putting yourself off eating the contents; other ingredients in these ones included potato starch, beef collagen casing, pork greaves, pork rind and smoke flavour. Yum.

In contrast to the ludicrously soft sprouts, these were turgid little things, with far more bite to them than your average frankfurter. I was expecting them to have a lot less flavour given that they are 72% chicken, but in fact they weren't too bad on that front. Must be all the other bits and bobs in them providing the flavour. Anyway, wrapped in bacon they looked the part, even if they were effectively chicks in pigs' clothing.

While I hadn't managed to find tinned bacon, I had managed to track down a tin of Ocean Spray Jellied Cranberry Sauce from the USA Food Store near Holland Park. Somewhat expensive, having been shipped over here from the States, but if you can't treat yourself at Christmas, when can you? I followed the label's instructions to remove the product intact: "insert a flat knife between the cranberry log and the back of the can to release the vacuum seal, invert and shake".


The 'log' plopped out onto my plate with a noise not unlike that which I feared would be emanating from my bowels later on after eating those sprouts. Essentially, the product is just cranberries with sufficient corn syrup added to set it to a jelly - quite a lot of the sweet stuff, I suspect, as there wasn't much of the bitterness of the cranberries still discernible. I suppose you could melt it down if you wanted a more traditional cranberry sauce, or dig out dollops of it with a spoon to your plate, but I rather liked the idea of having slices of sauce with my dinner, as it was sufficiently well-set to allow it to be 'carved' in this way.

Onto the main event - the turkey. A while back in M&S I had picked up a tin of cured turkey breast, reduced to clear as it was nearing its best before date. While the aforementioned sausages contained rather more poultry and rather less pork than I had been expecting, the turkey in this tin was the opposite, as it had been "formed from selected cuts of turkey breast with pork gelatine and added water". I'm not sure entirely what the purpose of the gelatine is - to help the turkey breast slide out of the tin, perhaps? They certainly hadn't scrimped on the gelatine - there was a thick layer of it glistening all over the meat when I turned it out onto a plate, with lots more left in the tin itself. It didn't look hugely appetising, although that may have been partly as I found it strangely reminiscent of the character Krang from the 1990s TV cartoon Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.

Krang

Turkey

Taking a slice from it though, it did appear to have a reassuringly poultry-like texture to it, and with its gelatinous gloop scraped off tasted much like the sort of pre-formed turkey slices made by Bernard Matthews or similar. As it was already cooked, and presumably intended to be eaten as it is from the tin, I wasn't entirely sure how well the turkey breast would fare in the oven, but as I still had a couple of remaining pieces of dough from the JusRol croissants I'd tried previously , I decided to wrap it up in those, with a stuffing-inspired layer of the chestnut puree, cranberry sauce and some of the mini sausages mashed up, to create a sort of turkey wellington.

It didn't look much going into the oven, but by some kind of kitchen alchemy, by the time it came out some twenty minutes later it actually looked a little bit like a bronzed turkey, which I then carved into nice thick slices before plating everything up.

As for the vegetables, the carrots didn't fare too badly from their time in the oven, and had started to get those lovely slightly caramelised roasted edges, but the outside of the potatoes had appeared more to just toughen rather then really crisping up at all. The chicks in blankets had probably had a little longer in the oven than needed - the bacon was nice and crispy, but the sausages had shrivelled somewhat.





The cranberry sauce/jelly was good with the turkey, and I particularly liked the fact that as they had come from the same sized tins, the slices of turkey and sauce were pretty much equal in diameter. The only thing really missing was any gravy - it was only when I was about half way through the meal that I thought I could perhaps have made some with a bit of melted down cranberry, chestnut puree, any pan scrapings and maybe even a bit of the gelatine from the turkey, though I had chucked the majority of that away anyway.

That possibly would have made it look even more of a car-crash on a plate than it already did - though frankly a Christmas dinner always does to some extent. It's only because it's made up of lots of tasty things that no-one really notices or minds.

Oh, and the brussels? Well, I ate them, but even the added butter and chestnut puree couldn't prevent them from being the only unpleasant element of the meal, which as a sprout lover I never thought I would say. And their 'after effects', so to speak, were every bit  as diabolical as predicted.