Tinned Fillings - Canned Microwave Meals

The final toastie filling for this month is canned microwave meals. I have never been a fan of canned microwave meals. To me, they are like aeroplane food, they look ok, smell ok, but there is something about them that is not quite right.

There are fast and easy meals and when served with a few pieces of buttered bread or toast make a good fall back when you are sick, injured or just cannot be bothered.

The flavours on offer from Campbell’s and Heinz are quite appealing. Every so often, I find myself tempted. A quick walk down the appropriate supermarket isle will reveal a long list of potential toastie filling candidates including beef stroganoff, lamb hot pot, peppered steak and gravy, chilli con cane, butter chicken curry, and lamb rogan josh.

Tinned Fillings - Baked Beans

Whenever people say toasties, the first filling that pops into my mind is baked beans. According to my resident toastie monster, baked bean and cheddar cheese is the ONLY toastie recipe. Not only that, it has to be Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce, apparently there are no other brands or sauce flavours in existence!

In reality, baked beans come in a number of different sauces including BBQ, ham, mild curry, cheesy tomato, and sweet chilli. One can even start branching out into Mexican chilli and refried beans. There are plenty of varieties of beany goodness for broad-minded toastie monsters.

Which is your favourite?

Tinned Fillings - Spaghetti

When one is asked to name ten different toastie fillings, tinned spaghetti is generally within the first five answers. Tinned spaghetti, like baked beans, comes in a number of different flavours. Other than standard tomato, the most common flavours are extra cheesy and extra tomato.

What I like most about tinned spaghetti toasties, is that they are a great excuse to let my inner child loose! Who wants to eat standard spaghetti when you can eat dinosaurs (Spag-a-saurus by SPC)! When I am not eating dinosaurs, I like to indulge in Oops Spaghetti O’s or Alphagetti by Heinz.

If you have young relations, which you look after from time to time, Heinz, also produces Dora the Explorer, Ben 10 and Wiggles Pasta shapes. Who would be the coolest uncle/aunt in the entire world if they served Dora Toasties?

If you want something other than standard flavoured spaghetti, Watties comes to the party with spaghetti with sausages and spaghetti with meatballs. You will need to cut the sausages and meatballs before putting them in your toastie maker.

Tinned Fillings - Flavoured Chicken

Fortunately/Unfortunately, I live with a bodybuilder. Not only is my pantry filled with cans of flavoured tuna, it is also full of cans of flavoured chicken. Unlike flavoured tuna, flavoured chicken varieties are somewhat limited, to plain/smoked, chilli, mayonnaise and red curry. The two most popular brands stocked at my local supermarket are Chop Chop and Heinz.

Surprisingly canned chicken is not as bad as you would think. It does look like real chicken. Taste wise, it tastes like chicken, albeit a bit salty. Then again, tinned tuna, does not taste as good as fresh tuna.

The important thing is that it tastes good in a toastie and is therefore worthy of a spot in this month’s recipes.

Heston's Feasts - Better The Breville You Know

Egg toastie with tomato sauce
*drools*

There I was, innocently making my favourite childhood toastie, when a head pops over my shoulder and says “ooooh toasties!” You could have scraped me off the ceiling. This is the beauty of toasties, young or old, how can you not be excited by the sounds and smells of a fresh toastie?

We started talking toasties. I work with a big bunch of nerds, so the conversation quickly swings towards Heston’s Feast’s and his giant Breville sandwich toaster. I was asked whether I had made the curried banana toastie from the show. Truth be told, I have not. I had not tried any of the three toasties from the show.

When I got back to my desk, toasted sandwich in hand, I started searching for the recipes. I found them on the Channel 4 website. I am not 100% sure that I am going to attempt the curried banana toastie, but here are the links in case you are more game than I am:

• Toasted curried banana sandwiches 
• Toasted scallops in white wine sauce sandwiches 
• Toasted sweet and sour pork sandwiches

Tinned Fillings - Flavoured Tuna

Let us kick off “Bachelor toastie fillings from a can” month, with the first thing that falls out of my pantry - Thai Green Curry Tuna by Safcol. Tinned tuna makes for a great toastie filling. I am particularly fond of the flavoured tunas.

A quick walk down the canned food section of my local supermarket reveals offerings from at least three different companies (Safcol, Green Seas and John West), who combined, produce at least 30 different varieties of flavoured tuna.

The flavours offered are not that bad, they range from plain and smoked flavours, through to spicy chilly, mayonnaise, and tomato and basil, all the way to fancy flavours such as red/green and Penang curries. For the health conscious, there are even 98% fat free varieties.

I could eat tuna toasties for over a month without doubling up on flavours! However, I may find myself being followed by a long line of hungry puddy-tats!

Introducing Monthly Themes

A couple of obvious suggestions
for tinned toastie fillings.

To make things a bit more interesting, I will be posting toastie recipes based upon a monthly theme. These themes will range from broad categories such as breakfast and desert fillings, to holiday themes, or restricting the ingredients used.

Like many children of my generation, toasties were one of the first things I learned how to “cook” successfully and unsupervised. The idea for this blog originally came from conversations with a bachelor friend of mine. He never learned how to cook despite all of the encouragement, gifts of cookbooks, and friendly heckling we gave him. Surprisingly, he said he made himself a toastie for lunch on the weekend.

In honour of my friends ‘cooking’, we will begin our monthly themes with bachelor fillings. Seeing, as this is such a broad theme, we will narrow it down to “bachelor toastie fillings from a can.”

I am hoping this blog will encourage him to expand his cooking skills and begin to explore new ingredients and flavour combinations.

If you have any ideas for monthly themes, please leave a comment. Feel free to make them as hard as possible.