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.