A few weeks ago whilst wondering around Tesco my wife and I came up with a plan to do a seventies themed dinner party featuring the kind of foods our mothers churned out. This was the era when convenience food really took off and being a career woman my mother totally embraced every frozen tinned or packet food that came on the market. We trawled the shelves for such items to do a trial run for the party, and came up with these:
Starter
Prawn cocktail made with Coleman sauce in a jar
Main course
Fray Bentos tinned steak pie, tinned new potatoes and carrots
Chicken in Homepride red wine cook-in sauce served with Smash
Pudding
Tinned peaches with Ideal condensed milk
Cheesecake (Greens packet) topped with tinned mandarin segments.
All preceeded by Snowball cocktails made with Warninks advocaat, or Martinis. After dinner coffee - percolated of course, with After Eight mints.
All a bit grim to be fair. Apart from the jar of Colemans cocktail sauce which was a great hit and was soon used up on prawn sandwiches over the coming days. And the Martinis, not least for the Leonard Rossiter/Joan Collins impressions that followed a few glasses.
