What can go wrong with tinned tomatoes?

The above was the question my sister asked me on Facebook last night in response to the following status:

Just had to make tea twice because there was something wrong with the tin of tomatoes I used. First attempt in the bin.

I had decided to cook three bean chilli, because I’d got home late due to working an extra hour (customers… grrr) and that’s a nice, quick and easy dish. I’d already fried the onion, garlic and chilli, poured in the beans and added some spices. Things were going swimmingly. Then it was time to add the tinned tomatoes. They looked perfectly normal in the tin. Then I poured them into the frying pan, stirred things around a bit, went to give the mixture a try and discovered it tasted funny. Odd! It hadn’t tasted funny before I added the tomatoes. I called Jan (who had come home early) over to give it a try just in case it was something weird with my tastebuds. Before he’d even picked up the fork, he remarked “This  smells… strange”. Hmm, not good. Not good at all. He then tasted it and confirmed my suspicions: “It doesn’t taste mouldy, but it doesn’t taste right!” I, meanwhile, had thought it tasted somehow plasticky or metally… definitely not like something food-related, anyway. I fished the tin (which I had already washed) back out of the bin and we both agreed that it smelled a bit fishy (as in like fish, not suspicious. Although the latter applies too).

That tin of tomatoes had been my last one, but luckily we had a jar of pizza sauce in the fridge (it came with one of those ready-to-roll pizza dough sets, but the dough went out of date before we could use it), and the cupboard yielded another tin of white beans and one of chick peas (which are technically beans, I think) so I was able to create a replacement meal and didn’t have to waste the rice, which was already read. And that’s the story of how I ended up having to cook tea twice. Not exactly how I had planned to spend my evening!

And the moral? Probably something along the lines of “Don’t be lazy and rely on tins… chop your own damn tomatoes!” Like that’s ever gonna happen…

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