Phantom Tins and Spooky Shrooms

Shortly after my last post, which featured fishcakes somewhat shoddily shaped as skulls, I came across the splendid blog Ghoul at Heart, which features an amazing collection of spooky-themed recipes, from a blogger who loves Halloween so much that she writes about it all year round. That might seem a little excessive, but when your creations are as good as these, why the hell not? I was particularly taken by her "Bread of the Dead" recipe, which is essentially just mushrooms on toast, but the mushrooms are individually carved into little skulls, and the bread is as dark as night, having had squid ink added to the dough. The skulls put my fishy attempts to complete and utter shame, though in my defence, they probably took rather longer to create. I felt I would just admire them rather than attempt to make them myself - but they did remind me that I had recently acquired a tin of Chinese straw mushrooms which were already fairly spooky-looking, without having had anything done to them.

How I came by the tin is a curious story. I had spotted it in a large Sainsbury's, on the tinned soup shelf - clearly not where it was supposed to be at all - and was immediately taken by the freakish faces. When I went to look at the World Foods section (where I assumed it should have been) to see what the price was, there didn't appear to be anywhere that it belonged. The general tinned vegetable shelves had various different types of tinned mushrooms - but not these. Then, when trying to scan it at the self-service checkout, it kept coming up as "Unknown Item". I've had many an "Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area" over the years, but never an unknown one in the scanning area. A puzzled assistant took the tin away to seek further help, only to return minutes later saying that there was no record of it on their system. A phantom tin - now I wanted it even more! But it seemed that might not be possible

"So we can't sell it to you I'm afraid, as we don't know for certain what's in it." she said.
"Oh, I see. Could I have it anyway though?" I asked, fully expecting the answer to be no.
"Ummm, I don't know," she replied, still looking somewhat puzzled. "I guess I could just...leave it here" - and she placed it on the side by the other items damaged or abandoned by self-service checkout customers. While she didn't expressly say so, it didn't seem as though it would be any issue what happened to the tin - it was probably going to end up in the bin whatever.

So, on my way out, I picked it up and put it in my bag with the rest of my shopping. It's not really stealing if it doesn't belong to the shop in the first place, is it? Nevertheless, I was bracing myself to have to explain this to the guard if the security alarm went off as I left, but of course it didn't, as it wasn't 'on the system' - and I walked out unchallenged. I was pleased to find it still in my bag when I got home - the phantom tin had not dematerialised, or been a figment of my imagination.

The picture on the label looked like the stuff of nightmares, with the mushrooms appearing to have very disconcerting grinning faces, like a strange hybrid of the masks from V for Vendetta and the Scream films. But the contents of a tin doesn't always look like the photo on the outside - would the real thing be as sinister?

Opening the tin, there were no faces waiting to jump out at me - but it turned out the mushrooms were all floating face down in their water, and were indeed just as freakish-looking as on the label. 

Or at lest some of them were - not all were quite as bad, and some of them, lacking those disturbing eyes, looked quite jolly, almost like a smiley-face emoji. 

Others didn't have faces at all, so just looked like misshapen lumps:

And there was something of the toad about this ugly-looking one:

I would love to say that they made up in taste for what they lacked in looks, but that wasn't true - sampled as they were from the tin, they were almost entirely tasteless, with a slightly rubbery texture. The water had a bit of mushroomy flavour to it, suggesting that perhaps once they had been more flavourful, but this had leeched out during the canning process. Foolishly I chucked the water away when I drained them - I realised later I could have used some of it to cook them in, so they would perhaps re-absorb some of the flavour, or use it like a vegetable stock for another recipe.

Still, there are plenty of other ways to bring out the best from your shrooms, and I went down the classic route of browning them in a pan with a couple of chopped cloves of garlic, a splash of white wine, and some parsley and lemon juice at the end.

Just as I hadn't particularly wanted to carve mushrooms into skulls, I didn't feel it was really necessary to make the black flatbreads from the "Bread of the Dead" recipe either - but I did unwittingly replicate the colour to some extent, by not keeping an eye on my toast, so it ended up slightly burnt.

Onto that, the faces were neatly arranged, staring up at me and looking like they were laughing at me maniacally. Or maybe the friendlier looking ones were laughing with me. But I had the last laugh whatever - doused in garlic and white wine, they were now vastly tastier, with slightly crisp edges here and there where they had caught on the pan, which made the rubberiness a lot less noticeable. Wielding a knife far less scary and sharp than the one in the Scream films - and a fork too - I finished them off in no time at all.

Quite why the tin had ended up on the shelves at Sainsbury's, or who left it there, I will probably never know. But as I'd got it for free, and had a tasty meal from it, I felt like I'd pulled off a trick and got a treat out of it too.