It occurred to me shortly after making the Butter Beans with White Wine, Sage and and Garlic from Jessica Elliott Dennison's Tin Can Magic that I should really have made the alternative version she gives a recipe for (Butter Beans with Red Wine and Fennel) at the same time, and tried them together to compare and contrast the two. Perhaps one day I will make a big batch of both when I have friends over for dinner, so I can ask "Red or white?" when it comes to serving up.
This reminded me though that I had done something similar a long time ago (in the very early days of this blog; yet another thing I never got round to writing about it) using tins of Homepride Cook-In Sauces. Well over five years must have passed now since I spotted these tins of Red Wine and White Wine & Cream sauces "reduced to clear" in my local supermarket. This seemed a little odd, as they were well within their best before dates, so I wondered if maybe they weren't selling very well and were being discontinued. Homepride make a whole range of ready-made sauces in jars, so perhaps those were just more popular among consumers - they're certainly a far more common sight on supermarket shelves. While we're used to buying tins of 'things in a sauce', be that beans, pasta or anything else, having a sauce on its own in a tin seems a bit strange, as if the main ingredient had been left out by mistake.
