Not entirely sure what this meanz...

Spotted in my local Co-Op yesterday morning - a somewhat unusual piece of 'on-shelf marketing', as I believe it is called, presumably to try to shift a few tins of beans:

I know we're considered to be a nation of bean lovers - but not that much, surely? Very weird.

Unless the Co-Op are trying to get people raising money for charity by suggesting that they lie in baths filled with baked beans? In which case good on them, but they should probably start selling catering-size tins, as the few standard ones seen here would barely fill a sink, let alone a bath.

Tweets Instead of Telegrams for a Sort-of-Centenary

A quick return here to Marguerite Patten's 500 Recipes:Canned and Frozen Foods, the day after what would have been her 100th birthday. The occasion was being marked yesterday by the Guild of Food Writers, inviting readers, cooks and bloggers to take part in a cookalong of sorts, preparing and eating some of her recipes and sharing the results on Twitter with the #Marguerite100 hashtag, which would either have amused or confused her - possibly both. I was a little late to the party with this offering, but thought it was still worth posting nonetheless.

I'd had a tin of raspberries in my stash for a very long time, but had yet to find anything I particularly wanted to do with them. With its recipes listed by tinned ingredient however, Marguerite's book made it easy to find some ideas to inspire.

I decided to go for her Raspberry Cream recipe, which seemed like a fairly quick and easy option, and unlike her scotch eggs that I made previosuly, sounded fairly virtuous too. And more to the point, I had all the ingredients to hand.

But first, the raspberries themselves. Marguerite notes that "canned raspberries are rather soft, so are not really good for decorating cakes and pastries. The flavour, however is extremely good." She's certainly not wrong on the first two fronts - mine prove to be soft almost to the point of falling apart, and while they do still resemble raspberries, I doubt you would get very far on the Great British Bake-Off by crowning your Showstopper with these.