Alternative uses for tins no.3

Buy tin of beans
Eat beans
Remove label
Rinse out tin (if time permits)
Turn upside down and use as packaging for fancy expensive perfume

Ten years on, tins still causing trouble

Another brief post about Back in Time for Dinner on BBC2, which is proving to be fascinating and amusing in equal measure. The second episode saw the Robshaw family fast-forwarded through to the sixties, experiencing huge changes in what and how people ate as the decade progressed. But mum Rochelle was still struggling in the kitchen, with a can of corned beef proving a particular challenge. To be fair, they aren't the easiest of tins to get into, so it came as no surprise that Rochelle managed to snap off the key, but she also made incredibly hard work of using a butterfly-style opener on it instead, which replaced the more primitive-looking one from last week in her newly updated 1960s kitchen.

Time travelling tins and pongy pilchards

Last week saw the start of a new series on BBC Two called Back in Time for Dinner, in which an ordinary modern family embarked "on an extraordinary time-travelling adventure, to discover how a post-war revolution in what we eat has transformed the way we live", as presenter Giles Coren told us in the intro to the episode, uncharacteristically expletive-free for once. The Robshaw family spent a week 'living' in each decade from the fifties to the 'naughties', having to "shop, cook and eat their way through history" and experiencing "the culinary fads, fashions and gadgets of each age", with not just the kitchen but the entire ground floor of their house remodelled to reflect how a typical home would have looked in that decade.

The Robshaws in 1950s attire. Plus Mary Berry and cake, as is mandatory for all BBC food programmes

Because nothing says "I love you Mum" quite like tinned meat...

A nice bit of tongue-in-cheek seasonal marketing from SPAM, featured today on their official Facebook page:

Presumably it's SPAM Original that is the mother of all meats - so does that make the SPAM with Bacon, which I tried recently, its child? Who was the father - a tin of Bacon Grill? Perhaps some other product can lay claim to be The Daddy of Meats. Or maybe I'm thinking too much into this...

Welshman's Caviar

I've always felt a certain affinity for Wales, despite not having (to my knowledge) even the slightest hint of Welsh heritage in my family history whatsoever. We did however spend a few very enjoyable holidays in a cottage in North Wales many years ago, so perhaps that's it. Or the fact that my name's David. Or that I really like leeks. Whatever the reason, I had been keen to mark St. David's Day in some way last year, just as I had tried the tin of Irish stew for St. Patrick's Day, and several Scottish delicacies too, but at that time I had yet to find any tinned Welsh products with which to do so.

All the tins in China

In my last post I told you all about the tinned sandwich I had picked up in Helsinki back in the summer of 2013 - a very brief visit to the city, as it was in fact just a stop-off on a journey elsewhere. Not, as you might guess, to see the Northern Lights, or somewhere nearby in Scandinavia or the Baltic states, but rather to China, to visit a very dear friend and former flatmate of mine who was teaching English in the city of Xi'an at the time. Given that we've recently moved into the Chinese New Year of the Sheep, this seems like the ideal time to tell you about my trip there. Is it really a year since we welcomed in the Year of the Horse though? Time doesn't half gallop by, does it?