Rudolph the red-fleshed reindeer

The Christmas Dinner Soup wasn't the only festive item I tried in December - earlier in the year I had also been fortunate to secure, via the OLIO food-sharing app, a tin of Reindeer Meat, from a Finnish company called Riipisen, which sells a range of similar products including elk and bear meat, and has its own game restaurant too in Ruka in northern Finland. I seem to remember being surprised to see tins of bear meat on sale at the airport when I went to Helsinki a few years back, as I had thought bears would probably be a protected species, but hopefully all their products are ethically-sourced.

Clearly I couldn't let Christmas pass without giving the tin a try. 

Christmas in a tin/bowl/sandwich

Belated festive greetings, one and all! You will have noticed somewhat of a surge in my posts earlier this month, having written precisely bugger all during the year up until then. I had at one point thought I would try and do a post every day in December up until Christmas, but held off from announcing it as an 'advent calendar' for fear that I probably wouldn't be able to keep it up - which of course, proved to be the case. 15 posts in one month isn't bad though - undoubtedly my most productive month since starting the blog.

I end the year with some hugely exciting Christmas tinned food news, relating back to a previous post - I managed to get my hands on a tin of Heinz's Limited Edition Christmas Dinner Big Soup! 

Tinned spaghetti for all

The range of foods now readily available for people with special dietary requirements really is quite extraordinary. My grandma suffered from incredibly restricting allergies in her later years, including severe intolerance to wheat and dairy, but during that time (in the 90s and early 2000s), the availability of products suitable for her diet was extremely limited, requiring a visit to either a specialist health-food shop, or the very largest of the supermarkets out of town.

These days, by contrast, you can expect to be able to pick up a gluten-free loaf or bag of pasta, a carton of oat, soya, rice or almond milk, a dairy-free chocolate bar and all sorts else at your local corner shop, Tesco Express or similar, and the range of products seems to be ever expanding. I can't say however that I have seen very many tinned goods in this category, so when I spotted this tin of spaghetti in tomato sauce a while back, made by an Australian company called Orgran, I was intrigued as to what it would be like.

Some tins just never seem to end

In my recent post on leftovers, I spoke of my efforts to use up an enormous tin of sauerkraut, which itself involved opening more tins, and then more tins to use up those, and so on. One tin that joined the endless train was a tin of chocolate flavoured custard - a relatively new product on the market from Ambrosia, who have been churning out tins of your standard yellow custard for over 50 years now.

The chocolate custard was not the only new variety from Ambrosia though; at the same time, tins of strawberry-flavoured custard appeared on the supermarket shelves, so naturally I bought one of those at the same time too.

How to 'Scandi-fy' your meatballs

1. Take one tin of meatballs in tomato sauce. 

A pizza the action

One of the many books, pamphlets and recipe cards I have added to my collection over recent years is this slender but nonetheless excellent spiral-bound tome, "101 Things to Do With Canned Soup", by Donna Kelly and Stephanie Ashcraft.

I'm not sure it really needs much explanation as to what it is about - it does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. Some might say that a whole chapter on Soups is cheating slightly - but in fact each of these recipes takes one or two tinned soups and makes something far more interesting out of them. 

Lovely jubbly?

A very quick one today, having spotted this tin in a branch of a well-known chain of bargain shops recently. Could this be Del Boy and Rodney's favourite tinned meat?

I just hope it is actually ham - remember a few years back when all sorts of odd and unpleasant meat products were being found in supermarket ready-meals? We don't want a repeat of that - Only Fools eat Horsemeat...

Apple and Blackberry - best friends stick together

More unusual tins today, this time on the fruit front: one of apples, and one of blackberries.

Maybe they're not that unusual, but I can't say I was familiar with either in tinned form before. It's near enough impossible to go anywhere from a tiny corner shop to a huge supermarket, at any time of year, and not find fresh apples for sale, so quite what the point of canning them is, I am not sure. Tinned blackberries does make more sense, as while you do seem to be able to buy punnets of blackberries all year round in supermarkets these days, I have always found them to be completely tasteless and stupidly expensive. Wild blackberries by contrast are bursting with flavour and available in abundance, for free - but only for a couple of months at most in late summer/early autumn. So, how would the tinned versions fare?

Bread and Butter - not destined for the gutter

There are certain tins that are fairly commonplace in kitchens pretty much everywhere - beans, tuna, tomatoes, chickpeas - your everyday tins; your "bread and butter" tins, if you will.

And then as this blog hopefully demonstrates, there are others which are far more unusual - your "bread" and "butter" tins, for example.

If that sounds a little confusing, it is deliberate - I was just trying to come up with an original way to start a blogpost about two unusual tins I'd tried - one of bread, and one of butter, both of which I had brought back from my travels some time ago. Bread! And butter! In tins! Crazy, I know. As soon as I saw them, I knew I couldn't return home without them.

Greek Night: not exactly a smashing meal

 I broke a plate the other day. 

Stupid really, it just slipped out of my hand while I was putting away the dishes I'd just washed up. I always feel annoyed with myself when that happens, and feel like smashing another one in frustration - or to even out the number I have left, at the very least. I usually manage to resist the temptation, but with plates it then always makes me think of Greek restaurants - and on this occasion, it reminded me of my tinned "Greek Night", from quite a few years ago now.

Let's do the Tin Warp again...

In an amusing tin-themed story from earlier this year, a theatre in Kent came into a spot of bother over the summer when, ahead of a touring production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show coming to the venue, they placed an order for 400 curly "Frank N. Furter" wigs to sell to fans during the show's week-long run.

Or at least the Dartford Theatre had thought they had ordered 400 wigs. Unfortunately there was a mix-up at the company who provided them, who supply all manner of party goods, from costumes and decorations through to food items.

Interesting tins and unusual meats: sharing food and memories

I have been using the food-sharing app OLIO quite a lot over the last year. It was set up as a way to try to reduce food waste in the UK, with people who sign up able to list food and other items that they either do not want or cannot use, for other users of the app to request for free and collect. If I'm honest, I mainly signed up in the hope that people might be listing some unusual tins that people didn't want, and while I have ended up getting all sorts of items through the app, it certainly hasn't disappointed on the tin front.

A while back I spotted that someone had listed this tin of Springbok Paté. The user had just described it as "paté" though, so at first I wasn't sure if Springbok was just a brand name, and hence it was just a Mild Herb paté, which wouldn't have been very exciting. Closer inspection of the photo however revealed that it did in fact contain 42% South African springbok meat - so I had to have it.

Leftovers, more leftovers, and yet more leftovers...

Another throwback to a post from last year - you may recall I created a tinned version of the hot dogs ordered for Mick "Crocodile" Dundee in New York City, in the first of that series of films - "one dog, with onions, chili, sauerkraut, and some peppers". In my version, each element (apart from the hot dog bun) came from a tin. I was able to use up most of the leftovers quite quickly, apart from the sauerkraut, which came in such an enormous tin, and was so densely packed into it, that I wondered quite how long it would take me to get through it all, decanted into a jar to store in the fridge. So there were an awful lot of sandwiches with sauerkraut added, sausages and mash with kraut on the side, and even the odd German-style schnitzel or potato salad with great spoonfuls of it for added authenticity. And still there was plenty of it left.

I eventually found a way to use it up after spotting an unusual recipe online - a German Chocolate Cake. With sauerkraut in it. It sounds utterly bonkers, and even a little unpleasant, but then again we are all used to using carrots and other vegetables like beetroot, pumpkin and courgette in cakes, which provide moisture and texture without only a hint of the flavour of the vegetable itself. Hopefully the sauerkraut would do the same, without its natural salty and sour taste coming through.

The recipe began with rinsing the kraut in a sieve, presumably to get rid of some of that flavour. Then it was mixed into a basic egg-sugar-flour-butter-cocoa cake batter, with a splash of dark German beer added for extra depth. 

Time for Beans

In a post last year I showed you some of the random tin-themed items I've purchased, mainly from eBay, but with the odd find from charity shops, car boot sales and so on.

I'd like to say that I've been making better use of my time and money this year. But with life still severely restricted by the virus, what else is there to do with it?

This explains why I have ended up with an egg timer in the shape of a tin of Heinz Beanz - which doesn't actually keep time very well, frequently just stopping before the desired time is over. I emailed the buyer to return it, but he just refunded me instead, so now it just sits there gathering dust on a shelf.

A window into the world of trendy tinned fish

One of the more unexpected food trends of recent years has been, believe it or not, tinned fish. We're not talking your bog-standard tins of tuna and salmon here though (so unless my last post goes viral, I can't see Nigel's salmon bake becoming the next big thing). As with most food trends, we're talking the fancy, artisanal posh stuff. And if it comes in a beautiful tin, so much the better.

There seem to be a number of Instagram accounts dedicated purely to tinned fish and seafood from Portugal and Spain - @tinnedfishclub, @tinned_fish_gazette and @tinned_not_canned to name but three - some concentrate solely on the tins themselves, but for others it's more about what's inside.

The hits and misses of a culinary hero

I've mentioned several times before on this blog that I'm a big fan of the writings and recipes of Nigel Slater. While I've enjoyed cooking for as long as I can remember (I even had a toy kitchen in my formative years, subjecting my family to having to pretend to eat and enjoy plates of plastic food from whatever restaurant, cafe or hotel I imagined myself to be proprietor of at the time), it was only when I was into my 20s that I started getting really interested in trying out recipes, collecting cookbooks and reading about food. Nigel Slater's columns in the Observer, with their elegant yet conversational prose, describing simple but satisfying dishes, were a huge influence, and I'm fairly sure his work makes up more of my cookbook collection than any other single writer. 

After more than 25 years writing for the same paper, his articles are still very much the backbone of the Guardian and Observer's renowned food content, all of which I follow fairly religiously. It was a great delight therefore to see Nigel featured in an article earlier this year as part of a series by critic Jay Rayner, when lockdown had imposed a hiatus on his usual restaurant column. In each article, he looked at an influential cookbook and its writer, examining the influence they have had on how we cook and eat in the UK today. 

Alongside such classics as Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food, Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating and Yotam Ottolenghi's eponymous first book, Jay gave equally high praise to one of Nigel's earliest books, Real Fast Food from 1992. He admired not just the simplicity and unfussiness of the book's recipes, which seem to just work with the minimum of time and effort, but the words too, sharing "the joy of eating and living well" and making you feel as if Nigel is there speaking directly to you. It's a sentiment I share, and while his more recent books are the ones I have tended to turn to of late, this article prompted me to bring down my copy from the shelf and flick through the pages again for inspiration and remind myself of what I'd tried before.

Have a souper Christmas with Heinz

I was doing so well last year, wasn't I? 20 blogposts in 2020 (even if the last few were a bit rushed in the dying days and hours). This year: less success. Or rather, no success. A downright failure really. I have had various posts half-written for months, but somehow I just haven't got round to finishing them. I am determined to pull my finger out and do so before the end of the year though, and get a few unfinished posts up, and maybe a few additional shorter ones too. But seeing as it's 1st December, we might as well cut to the chase and talk Christmas right away.

It's the time of year when food brands bring out their festive editions in an attempt to boost sales, whether that be simply a change in packaging to include a snowman or reindeer, the addition of some Christmassy flavours or colours to an existing product, or something entirely new. Heinz have this year managed to create a social media sensation by releasing an incredibly limited edition new product to its Big Soup range: Christmas Dinner. In soup form.