Nightjar wrote:

What about Kwik-Save?

Anyone remember Kwik-Save?

Yes. Their own brand was called "No Frills".

The Aldi where my parents shop used to be a Kwik-Save.

Kwik-Save used to save money by not putting price labels on their merchandise (this was in the days before bar code scanners) and instead made their checkout staff memorise the 100 most popular prices. Or was it 1000?

Nightjar wrote:

I have never even seen a Heron Foods.

I overtook a Heron Foods lorry on the M1 last Sunday.

I did some food shopping in B&M Bargains yesterday. They had a product I hadn't seen before - like those rice pouches but with cooked pasta in them. I bought three, at a cost of £3.75.

One of the pouches was just plain pasta. I had it with a tin of vegetable bolognese I'd purchased elsewhere, all heated up by my patent kettle/camping saucepan method. It was quite nice.

Do you have to add water to the pasta pouches, or just (normally) put them in the the microwave for a couple of minutes like the rice ones?

The latter. You can get two kinds of dried pasta sachets:

1. Instant pot-noodle style ones in the Mug Shot 'no pot' range, but the pasta in those never absorbs the water properly.

2. Ones where you add water and then heat for 5 minutes in a saucepan, stirring occasionally. You can cook those in the instant way, but it takes like 4 hours for them to absorb the water. You have to do them in a food Thermos for the results to be hot - and then your food flask always smells of that particular dish

The benefit of the precooked pouches is that the pasta can also be in a fat-based sauce. I've got a tomato & herb and a chilli tomato one still to try.

I tried the second of those three Pasta Pronto packs I bought, today. This one in tomato and basil sauce. I had it with sliced quorn cocktail sausages heated on the inner lid of my camping saucepan, then mixed in.

The sauce was rather thick and intense, but it went well with the sausage slices.

Can't wait to try the last variety, tomato & chilli. I might have pinto beans with that.

Yesterday evening, I popped into Heron and bought myself a big bar of Dairy Milk.

But when I got home and looked at it, this is what confronted me.



What sort of monsters would be so evil as to sell such a thing in Sheffield?

I still ate it though.

I bought my brother a Man U one of those for his extra Christmas present.

Could be worse

Spoiler:

I bet it tastes of bad eggs and hatred.

Heron do sell some weird stuff. Like limited edition or end-of-line products, sometimes actually out of date stuff! Is that even legal?!

I do wonder if that Chelsea Dairy Milk has been shifted around shops a few times then travelled however many hundred miles to its final destination.

If you find a new and interesting product in Heron it likely won't be there again in a couple of weeks time once the stock has sold out.

The one I used to go in sold pink Coco Pops for a while which actually had layers of industrial dust on the boxes - and were out of date! They were quite nice, but then they just vanished.

Butterfield wrote:

If you find a new and interesting product in Heron it likely won't be there again in a couple of weeks time once the stock has sold out.

Their frozen Pakora disappeared very quickly.