Ye Olde Oak Hot Dog Sausages

Kids being Kids and not knowing what is good or bad for them will eat whatever is in fashion, no matter how much you try to give them their five portions of fruit and veg each day.

So it comes to the night of the sleepover. I suggest Jacket potatoes with bacon and salad. Fresh fruit juice to drink.

My daughter immediately looks at me as if I have come from Mars. Then she starts the sad eyed pleading bit, Muuum all my friends have hotdogs and coke at their sleepovers. At the back of my mind I was thinking I hope she meant coke as in fizzy pop.

Yes, I did give in, but as I picked up a couple of tins of ye old oak hot dogs, came the reminder from a couple of years ago from the foods standards people about tins of hotdogs exploding because of the bacterial growth in them.

Mmm I thought to myself I could give these kids food poisoning, what should I do.

I didn’t really have a lot of choice in the matter, my husband who eats anything and everything twisted my arm by saying, if you don’t get her hotdogs her mates will start saying this and the other blah, blah, blah.

So hotdogs it was at 48pence for a 400g tin (8 sausages) who could really complain. On the front of the tin was a picture of hotdogs and on the back were the usual ingredients. (Prices may vary from store to store) These were the premium sausages in brine.

I remember as a kid walking along Rhyl front (a seaside town) eating hotdogs and thoroughly enjoying them. (Don’t forget I was a kid then, unaware of food standards etc.) I must add my parents used to frown when I asked for a hotdog and tried persuading me to have a fresh fish.

I opened up the tins on the night of the sleep over and plopped the sausages, which were packed like sardines into my colander ready to drain before I added them to a pan of fresh water.

Each sausage was thin, slimy and skinless, as you would expect. They didn’t have an off smell, so I was content with the fact that these kids were going to eat raw muscle that has been ground up into semi solid portions that have additives and have been cured, coloured and flavoured. Yuck.

My daughter can be quite squeamish and left half of her hot dog, when I questioned her the next day as to why she left her hot dog, she said there was a small bone in it and it put her off, little did she know that it was most probably part of a pigs ear or snout that hadn’t been ground up properly.

For 48pence eat and enjoy, but don’t include me.