"Hello," I thought, spotting a tempting and tangy treat on the shelf of my local Tesco Express. "Wait," I thought, surprised to be having another so soon, "Did I say that aloud?"
I certainly wasn't going to wait to find out. I scooped up my reduced-price bounty, being a pack of 4 Pork Farms mini pork pies topped with Branston Pickle, and whipped through the self service checkout with only the minimum required amount of frustrated swearing.
Sweaty with panic and excitement, I tore into the green pinstripe (!) packaging, to reveal my pork quatrain, housed in a flippy-lid lunchbox thing made of flimsy thermoplastic. I would eat as I walked; the consumption of pies being easily accommodated into one's stride, as a rule.
The pies did not make a good first impression. A fat blob of dark Branston brand pickle was dobbed sloppily on top of each of the pies, giving them the look of evil, bubbling vol-au-vents. The combination of the supportive, protective packaging and the loose generosity of the pickle portion made the short journey from pie-sheath to mouth a messy business. I found my hands stickily besmirched and the corners of my mouth similarly tainted.
The recessed flat top of the pie was stained a deep brown, and had become damp and soft, but not soggy.
And what of the taste? How sweet the duet or how bloody the battle when these two poet warriors, Branston Pickle and mini pork pie, met?
The Branston acquitted itself well as a sweet, tart and sharp welcome party. After the punch of the pickle, the pie itself was disappointing. The pastry was bland and doughy and the meat filling an underseasoned oyster of stodge. I was left with a slightly sick and greasy feeling after my brief, shameful dalliance with this gussied up meat tart.
The Pork Farms pie with Branston pickle unfortunately pales in comparison with a near competitor, Waitrose Pork & Pickle Pies.
The Waitrose product conceals its (unbranded) pickle surprise beneath a crust, which makes it much easier and neater to eat. Said crust is dotted with delicious seeds and its pastry and filling are just a lot lighter and more delicate.
At £1.49 for 4 the Pork Farm product has the edge on value, thrusting a hairy, tattooed arm across the face of the daintier, £1.39 for 2, Waitrose pies. I know which I'd rather though.
Price: £1.49 for 4
Try: Waitrose 2 Pork & Pickle Pies (£1.39 for 2)
Our Rating: 
VN:F [1.9.3_1094]
Rating: 4.0/5 (2 votes cast)
Category Food and Drink |
After months using Schwarzkopf Live Colour XXL 
hair colourants in varying shades of vibrant (and often violent) red, I fancied a change. I made the switch to L'Oreal Feria 3D Hair Color
in mango intense copper.
Before I continue with my L’Oreal Feria review, I should say that I have naturally dark hair, which always makes the application of brighter and lighter shades a bit tricky. So, how did it fare?
First of all, the application process. Unlike other colourants, you apply this product when your hair is wet. This is actually much easier, as rather than splashing it around your head, you simply massage it in like a shampoo and work up a lovely lather. Also, it was a nice change not to find myself choking on acrid fumes.
A problem I have experienced with previous dyes is how long it takes to wash out after first application, as you aren’t supposed to be finished until the water runs clear. I have spent nearly an hour in the shower waiting for this to happen, with endless red colour streaming from my hair and turning the bathroom into something resembling a grisly murder scene.
This doesn’t happen with L’Oreal Feria, as it took just a bit longer than a normal hair wash to get all of the colour out. There was also no problem with the colour bleeding in subsequent washes, so you can take baths and even go swimming without turning the water a different colour.
So, after a smooth and easy application, what did the colour look like? It was as vibrant, multi-faceted and healthy-looking as it looked on the box, even with my dark hair. The colour did fade after a few weeks, but this is to be expected with darker hair colours. In fact, when I did feel the need to dye my hair again, it was because of my roots growing out rather than the colour fading.
In short, L’Oreal Feria hair colour is much easier to use than other colourants, and it delivers relatively long-lasting colour that actually resembles the shade on the box.
Our Rating:
VN:F [1.9.3_1094]
Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)
Category Health and Beauty, Shopping |
It's Cholula's turn in our Hot Spot (apologies if we've stolen that by the way), and what a rich, herby turn it is. It just isn't very hot unfortunately. Not sure what to make of that, are you?
Not very hot, even in a generous measure, Cholula Original Hot Sauce is nonetheless classy and tasty. It has no business calling itself a hot sauce though.
With a flavour like a concentrated shot of the tomato sauce from your own homemade chilli con carne, Cholula is a milder option, thinner than the majority of hot sauces, with greater focus on tickling your tastebuds than on eviscerating them.
You could happily stick a bottle of Cholula original on the table and use it like an everyday condiment without overpowering either little apple-cheeked children or saggy-faced grandparents. It likely lacks the bite and pop to impress your friends however, and real hot sauce enthusiasts will scoff at you. In your own home.
Filled with a blend of peppers, chile arbol and secret spices, a bottle of Cholula looks the part, rustically wooden-topped and hinting at Mexican authenticity. It's good, in its own way, and would make a fine part of a Justice League-style team of hot sauce super-heroes (doing something administrative, probably) but if you had to choose only one hot sauce for the rest of your days (you don't, I don't have that kind of authority, yet) it would not be this one.
Glug test: We're serious about our hot sauce reviews so we put our health, and the sanctity of our bathrooms, on the line by taking a stiff whomp from the bottle, for an immersive HD chilli experience.
Cholula fares okay. It does, imbibed unadulterated and in enough quantities, burn the tongue but not hard. A good big gulp of Cholula hot sauce hurt about as much as a dribble or drop from another peppier brand, and tasted a bit like a Bloody Mary, which is all very underwhelming.
Price: £1.22 for 150ml (Asda, similar in Tesco, Waitrose)
Our Rating: 
VN:F [1.9.3_1094]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
Category Food and Drink |
A hot sauce gift pack review, containing the use of the word 'ass' more times than is comfortable
Hot, properly hot, as you'd expect of a sauce which claims to be 'kick your ass hot', Ass Kickin' hot sauces also deliver on flavour. This isn't a gourmet product and the sauces are perhaps a little sugary and synthetic; thick like a stiff ketchup, you need only a drop or a dribble from these miniature bottles to ignite a sandwich, soup or stirfry. A stupid glug from the bottle resulted in a coughing fit and a feeling like someone had taken a soldering iron to my sinuses.
Used properly, this is not a vicious, startling burn but consistent and pretty deep. AKHS fizzes cheekily initially before settling down to a pleasant, tolerable heat.
This is a stubborn hot sauce too. A small dose of sauce from a daintily dipped digit made itself at home on the tip of my tongue and the roof of my mouth for well over five minutes, delivering a lovely buzz.
All the flavours are based around the Ass Kickin' Original Hot Sauce, which uses tomato paste and habanero peppers as its base, so the basics remain the roughly same whatever variety you go for, with the heat of the chillies pretty consistent across the range.
The Ass Kickin' Cajun flavour has a slightly more peppery – like Cayenne pepper – swagger about it, slightly smokey thanks to some special Louisianan spices. Where the Original hot sauce combines its citric, fruity habanero chillies with crisp, genuinely hot and ever-popular Serrano peppers, the Cajun sauce employs the milder spice of the jalapeño as its secondary weapon.
Ass Kickin' Roasted Garlic is probably the tastiest, which is to say it has the most distinctive flavour and tastes the best. Sweet, because roasted garlic is sweet. Like the Cajun flavour this sauce derives its heat from habanero and jalapeño peppers.
The hottest of this fiery fourtet is the Ass Kickin' Wasabi, which combines wasabi horseradish with habanero peppers for an extra kick. I can't usually cope with wasabi, I find it too intense and sour on the palette, but this doesn't really taste much of wasabi at all. You get the extra heat, and a slight tweak in flavour, but it's not some awful hybrid worst of both worlds like it might have been.
Ass Kickin' Cajun, Ass Kickin' Roasted Garlic, Ass Kickin' Horseradish, and Ass Kickin' Original (all in mini 22ml bottles.)
Our Rating:
VN:F [1.9.3_1094]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
Category Food and Drink |
England falter to a draw in Montenegro, and qualify for Euro 2012 in the process. They'll play the opening matches without Wayne Rooney though following his petulant second-half red card.
A moment of madness from Wayne Rooney saw stop-start England blow a two goal lead against relative minnows Montenegro, with Fabio Capello's infuriatingly inconsistent men crumbling from a position of absolute power to a 2-2 draw. Down to 10 men and hanging on by the end, England can take comfort from the fact that they picked up the point they required to guarantee qualification for the 2012 European Championships in Poland and Ukraine.
Montenegro, the youngest of all the world's international teams, have ample reason to celebrate having taken points off England both home and away. Montenegrin fans in Podgorica went suitably and understandably mental as their side equalised in the final minutes, earning the country a famous result and guaranteeing the Balkan side a coveted play off place.
You don't care about that though do you, by jingo? What about England? How bad were the bastards tonight, right? In actuality, underwhelming result considered, it wasn't all bad.
England's first half display was full of promise, with Gareth Barry and Scott Parker anchoring the midfield, allowing Ashley Young and Theo Walcott to cause real problems down the flanks. England moved the ball well, surprising those of us who regularly suffer through those turgid international matches where England look like strangers to each other and to the sport generally, releasing their wingers into frequent acres of space.
- United England celebrate their opener against Montenegro
Classic wing play left its mucky Chris Huhne style fingerprints over both of England's first half goals. Walcott and Young combined early in the piece for England's opener, with the diminutive Arsenal flyer, unopposed after a nice England move, pulling out an all-too-infrequent pearler of a cross, to which Manchester United's Young applied the inevitable finish from close range.
Things were looking rosy for England, playing in Umbro's fetching new, blue England Away strip, and the away side dominated, comfortable in possession despite the problems caused by a choppy, slippery pitch, which didn’t look up to international standard to me.
Capitalising on their advantage, with Montenegro looking somewhat undone having seen the bus they planned to park in front of goal unceremoniously towed away, England sliced through the home defence again after about half an hour.
Wayne Rooney dropping off and linking midfield to attack, like a close relative linking a famous footballer to the criminal underworld, slid a lovely, effortless ball through to club team-mate Ashley Young. Young cut the ball back from the left to former Aston Villa club-mate Darren Bent, who applied a customary close range finish to cap off an incestuous move. Bent has a handy knack of being in the right place at the right time, making unfashionable runs into seemingly forgotten, very profitable attacking areas. Good for him.
England knocked it about merrily for the unmemorable remainder of the half, very happy with a two goal lead, looking utterly untroubled as half time approached. It was all very easy for Capello's team, but they might have switched off a bit early as Montenegro snatched a goal back on the stroke of half time. A well struck shot from Elsad Zverotic brought the Podgorica crowd round from their reverie, and scared me half to death, zipping past Joe Hart from the edge of the 18 yard box.
Totally against the run of play, and entirely unmerited, Montenegro nonetheless carried the impetus from their late first half strike into the second period, looking rejuvenated, spirited and incisive in comparison with the shell-shocked inhibition of their first half showing.
England, though, were sloppy and sluggish after the break, missing the zip and the confidence which made their performance in the early stages of the match so refreshingly positive.
Montenegro knocked on the door of an equaliser throughout the half, rattling England and forcing the visitors into careless disjointedness. England survived one very good penalty shout after debutant Phil Jones tripped– and I mean very clearly tripped - Stevan Jovetic near the byline, and sighed in relief again as the referee rightly turned down another appeal from Jovetic, this time diving desperately, and distastefully, under some imagined England tackle.
The second of these penalty decisions came after the match's key moment. Wayne Rooney, in the headlines and presumably under a bit of stress following the embroilment of his father in allegations of illegal betting activity, frustrated by England's shoddy second-half display, boiled over with about 20 minutes of the match remaining.
- England's Wayne Rooney lashes out at Miodrag Dzudovic
Stumbling in receipt of a pass, just over the half-way line, receiving an habitual dose of close, none-too-friendly attention from defender Dzudovic, Rooney lost the ball to the Montenegrin. Rooney kicked out petulantly, but not especially viciously, at the back of Dzudovic's legs and the Montenegro man crumpled, screaming, as though someone had reached up his arse and yanked on his spine. A red card swiftly followed.
It was very silly on Rooney's part, but also a bit of a soft one, reminiscent of his infamous 'Winkgate' dismissal against Portugal in England's last unsuccessful Euro adventure, and of David Beckham's career-changing sending off against Argentina.
As in those cases, the referee took the bait, drawn in by the player's reputation and by the overwrought reaction of the felled player, but the fact remains that Rooney put the referee in a position where he had to make a decision. He probably should have booked the England man and told him not to be such a dick, but with the home crowd baying and a chance to dish out a red card to a famously hot-headed, headline making superstar, what was he going to do?
It was mostly Montenegro in the ascendancy from that idiotic point on, with Joe Hart called into action with smart saves on a couple of occasions, and Scott Parker patrolling tirelessly in front of his back four. Under heavy Montenegrin pressure, diminished by the loss of Rooney and disjointed following the ensuing substitutions, England could not sustain any meaningful possession.
The equaliser when it came, came as no real surprise, but its timing, coming so close to the final whistle, will have been a blow to an England side who looked as though they were going to hold on. It was the 88th minute when Joe Hart found himself stuck under a swirling cross from the right hand side; with the England goalkeeper out of commission Andrija Delibasic nodded in comfortably at the back post and the stadium erupted.
England played the game out without further incident to secure a wobbly but crucial point. Talk turned after the game to England's qualification and to a job done; objective achieved, this young England team now need to use the promising, if patchy, foundations they have latterly established under Fabio Capello's increasingly unfussy regime to build towards the challnege of next year's championships. It will be a massive surprise if England are anywhere near the final come next summer. I like surprises though.
VN:F [1.9.3_1094]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
Category Sport |
