best and worst tastes for your money

[davebrown]

Sunday Tea.... now you're talking.

Fray Bentos corned beef. Either in a white bread sandwich with Anchor or with hand cut chips and tinned peas.

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Tinned cod roes, deep fried in batter, brown sauce, mushy peas.

I fear I may be losing credibility here before I've actually gained it, but what the hell it's my mouth.

[Tim Hayward]

Sunday Tea.... now you're talking.

Fray Bentos corned beef. Either in a white bread sandwich with Anchor or with hand cut chips and tinned peas.

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Tinned cod roes, deep fried in batter, brown sauce, mushy peas.

I fear I may be losing credibility here before I've actually gained it, but what the hell it's my mouth.

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"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is". Noël Coward

Seems the same could be said of food.

Ah! Nostalgia - the new MSG.

[Matthew Grant]

Heinz spaghetti on toast

[k43]

A Kossar's bialy (60 cents, and s@p#f%l&t* to all you non-New Yorkers who can't get them), lightly toasted and spread with the chicken essence (and plenty of the fat) that collects in the bottom of the roasting pan.

It's so good that your vision goes dim, because your brain is using all it's energy to take in the flavor.

[offcentre]

Best - mcvities rich tea biscuit with a thick scrape of unsalted butter. Can't be beaten with a cup of tea.

Worst - marmite - its the devils arse juice.

[lexy]

Best - mcvities rich tea biscuit with a thick scrape of unsalted butter. Can't be beaten with a cup of tea.

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*nods vigourously* key is to dip into into the tea until it's just soggy. Even better is choc digestives (no butter) dipped until the chocolate melts

[Jenny McClure]

Best - mcvities rich tea biscuit with a thick scrape of unsalted butter. Can't be beaten with a cup of tea.

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*nods vigourously* key is to dip into into the tea until it's just soggy. Even better is choc digestives (no butter) dipped until the chocolate melts

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Oh Definately!! Heinz Spaghetti on toast, it's been so long, but always a reliable stand by to cure the grumble.

Baked pototatoes with......anything

[tsure]

This may be slightly off topic and if so...well, do whatever is called for, but...

What is the English obsession with canned green peas? My last trip to London, every dish I ordered (with the exception of ice cream) was accompanied by a ladle-full of green peas....what's with that. I don't remember being inundated with green peas on any of my other trips to the UK (mercifully mind blanked perhaps?).

[Carlovski]

Slight cliche but spaghetti (Actually I usually use linguini) with olive oil, garlic and chilli can't cost more than 50p. i'm sure it's better with better oil (Although with the amount of chilli and garlic I use you probably couldn't tell) but still good hangover food with the cheap stuff.

That and 9p instant noodles.

Worst value for me is premium tinned/jarred tuna. Yes it's nicer, but for the premium on some of the spanish stuff it doesn't seem quite the difference you would expect.

[Tim Hayward]

This may be slightly off topic and if so...well, do whatever is called for, but...

What is the English obsession with canned green peas?  My last trip to London, every dish I ordered (with the exception of ice cream) was accompanied by a ladle-full of green peas....what's with that.  I don't remember being inundated with green peas on any of my other trips to the UK (mercifully mind blanked perhaps?).

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Those were frozen peas. An abomination.

Immature peas, ripped untimely from the pod and frozen within seconds. Foodies bang on for hours about what a marvellous vindication of the freezing process they are.

Crap!

They taste like little condoms full of chlorophyll.

A PROPER PEA has been allowed to wax fat upon the vine. All that boring liquid protein turns into healthy starch and the plump, delicious pulse has become a little storehouse of goodness. At this point they are either...

a) Picked, dried, packed, bought by your Nan, soaked overnight with bicarb, boiled to death and served with love or...

b) Picked, dried, boiled to death, dyed green, stuck in tins and labelled 'Marrowfat Peas'.

Either option is food for the Gods.

Turn from the frozen pea, O my Brothers. Cast it down. It is Satan's work and has no place on a decent man's plate.

Addendum: If, by chance, you were alluding to canned Petits Pois; they are French and thus, simply wrong.

[k43]

My wife actually found (in NYC) a can labelled "Mushy Pease." They were exactly as advertized -- dreadful hot, cold or 9 days old.

[fisherman]

Let's not get onto the differences between Pease Pudding and Mushy Peas, that's a thread on it's own

[davebrown]

My wife actually found (in NYC) a can labelled "Mushy Pease."  They were exactly as advertized -- dreadful hot, cold or 9 days old.

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Probably you weren't putting enough malt vinegar on them. With the fat leaking from the fried fish on the same plate, it's the ancestor of the warm salad.

Edited May 4, 2006 by davebrown (log)

[PoppySeedBagel]

How about home-made red lentil soup - with gentle spices, and home-made chicken stock [ t/a free, as many people throw away the carcass]?

To the Rich Tea butterer above - have you tried them buttered then toasted? Even better...

These days I also keep a packet of AMT dried mango in my bag - £1.20 of heaven, which I think is good value if not cheap. AMT are behind the (pretty good) coffee stalls at mainline London railway stations, and their dried mango is perfect - not sweetened, just strongly fruity, and not too soft.

Edited May 5, 2006 by PoppySeedBagel (log)

[CheGuevara]

2 x free range eggs @ £1.50 per half doz  = 50p

1 slice off a sourdough loaf @ £1.60 = Let's say 10p

25g Echire butter @ £2.00 250g = 20p

1 Tbsp double cream @ 25p per 100ml = 2.75... let's say 3p

Allow 5p for peppercorns, salt (Malden, natch).

Borrow rather than buy Bill Grainger's book...

88p for the best scrambled eggs in your life.

Unfair - as total outlay is more like four or five quid, esp given you'd have to buy a decent sized block of butter, not just a scrape.

Not convined by tinned tomatoes on toast - the problem is all that juice tends to soak into the toast and make it soggy. Maybe it'll work with a fried slice?

Beans on toast maybe - important to use cheap and nasty margarine. Doesn't taste quite the same with propah butter (same logic applies to bacon butties)

Actually for cheap tastes I'd nominate 49p McDonalds hamburgers when they have them on special cheapo offer. Four for two quid Mmmm... Teenage hanging-around-in-the-shopping-centre nostalgia. Yes slightly controversial I know but then again I think I'm the only person who know who desperate wanted to go and buy a McD's hamburger after reading Fast Food Nation...

J

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i actually was dying for mc donald's after watching "super size me".

-che

[Syrah]

It's got to be bruschetta.

Thick slice of Italian bread toasted, rubbed with a fat garlic clove, sliced tomatoes on top with a drizzle of olive oil and some torn basil.

Big flavour return on your money there. 

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It's panzanella (italian bread salad)

[offcentre]

To the Rich Tea butterer above - have you tried them buttered then toasted?  Even better...

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whoa - hold on a minute. Are you saying you butter a rich tea biscuit and then stick it under the grill?

This is pretty radical.

[naebody]

Immature peas, ripped untimely from the pod and frozen within seconds. Foodies bang on for hours about what a marvellous vindication of the freezing process they are.

Crap!

They taste like little condoms full of chlorophyll.

Excellent. What a corrective, cathartic thread this is proving to be.

Like everyone else in this odd little country, I'd heard the frozen pea theory so many times that I'd come to believe it. Risotto primavera was, I had assumed, intended to taste like a swimming pool.

Where did this shared pea delusion start? Why, in a rare circumstance when the Brits had both the the land and the labour available to do something right, did we still manage to get is so completely wrong? Was there some kind of Birds Eye payola afoot among cookery writers?

(Incidentally: those new Birds' Eye adverts, in which a Blumenthal/Whittingstall hybrid questions stooge shopkeepers about how Alphabyte Reconstituted Gunkballs are equivalent to a real potato because they've been given the same treatment as Walt Disney's head, is arguably the lowest point yet for human civilisation. But I digress ... )

A second vote for those 9p packets of noodles. The absolutely best ones are those with packaging entirely in Mandarin, meaning you're never completely sure if the Salt'N'Shake-style stock packet is chicken, beef or vegetable until it starts bubbling (and even then it's often a line call). It's like a savoury version of Revels.

[davebrown]

Like everyone else in this odd little country, I'd heard the frozen pea theory so many times that I'd come to believe it. Risotto primavera was, I had assumed, intended to taste like a swimming pool.

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Indeed. You've always got to be suspicious of a food that nobody actually dislikes.

On the plus side, I hear they are very good at reducing inflamation after sprains.