Faggots for tea - yum, yum. I sent Mark to the supermarket in search of something 'different' and this is what he came back with. I've not had them for ages (just never think to buy them!) and just scoffed 2 with chips and peas and they were delicious. The particular faggots I'm writing about are 'Mr Brain's 4 pork faggots in a rich west country sauce.' And what a clever chap Mr Brain's is - who would have thought something as revolting as pork liver could be made into something so thoroughly lovely.

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I took my faggots out of the box and was confronted with a foil carton (like what you get from the chinese) covered with a card lid. Before you cook the faggots, you have to loosen the edge of the foil around the lid and put it in the oven. Easy peasy. Make sure you don't loosen the lid too much though or the bottom of your cooker will be covered in gravy! Now cooking them is a bit of a hit & miss affair. Because they're completely covered by the foil container and lid you have to time them perfectly or you either end up with hardly any gravy or worse, faggots that are still cold in the middle! Lovely - NOT! I find its best to cook them for the full 40 mins cos in my oven they're never cooked properly after 30 mins. I love faggots and chips so halfway though cooking I put my oven chips in because the brilliant thing about Mr Brain's faggots is they arre cooked at Gas Mark 8, which is the same temp as most oven chips.

And they taste gorgeous. Theres a slightly spicy taste to them, which is hard to describe because the spice comes in as more of an aftertaste. You can taste the pork, although it tastes nothing like normal pork, and also the taste of the onion comes through nicely. I can actually taste a bit of tomato in these faggots, although looking on the ingredients list only a little bit of tomato puree is used. And they are sooooo moreish - I have 2 faggots and couldn't really manage anymore, but they taste so lovely I think I could eat the 4 if no-one else wanted any! The texture of them is good too, they're soft and chewy but they break up nicely into crumbly pieces. Sometimes if you leave them in for slightly longer and the gravy starts boiling away you get a lovely 'crust' on top of the faggots, but you'll never get this deliberately - you just have to forget about them! The only thing I can thing of off the top of my head to liken them to is haggis, although haggis is much spicier than faggots. And when you buy them don't imagine fresh butchers faggots because they're nothing like this in either taste or appearance - I personally prefer Mr Brains's faggots to fresh anyway. The gravy is thick and tastes like fresh gravy - although theres a slightly synthetic aftertaste to the gravy. Also, you don't get too much gravy with them, which is fine for me as I'm not a big gravy person but I always have to make some extra gravy up for Mark (who likes his dinner swimming round in a sea of gravy!)

I'll definately buy them again as they're perfect when you're rushing about because its just a case of shoving them in the oven and forgetting about them.