M&S Hand Cooked Lightly Salted Highland Burgundy Red British Potato Crisps

What a complicated name for a 40g packet of crisps! Remember all you fans of imperial measurements, 40g is a mere 1.41 ounces of crisp. Not a lot.

Here we have Marks & Spencer's Christmas crisps for 2014. 5% of the sale goes to Shelter which is a UK charity helping homeless people. Which is great but I rather wish it was more than 5%.

However, what do we really have here? Well, the potatoes are obviously stunning when you chop into them.  I've looked on the Thompson & Morgan website - they sell lots of plants and seeds, and in the case of potatoes: tubers.  And you can absolutely see that these crisps are hardly fiddled with at all. The factory has chopped up the Highland Burgundy potatoes and fried them.  So you get a fancy red crisp with a white surround. Actually grown for you by a potato plant. Hurrah!

Lightly salted? Yes. Quite tasty but for me, there could have been a little more salt. You know I like my salt. And quite a hearty crunch. So not a bad crisp at all.
Yup. Pretty good. So buy some soon and support Shelter.

M&S Maple Bacon Flavour Popcorn

I have to admit I bought this packet of popcorn thinking it would probably be rather horrid. But it's not. And a good thing too. Just for a change it made an interesting addition to today's lunch.

I thought it would be horrid because I've not had a good experience with bacon flavour crisps. They can be (in my opinion obviously) really disgusting. But you know, this was actually quite nice. The popcorn looks just like popcorn should, quite white, no extra colour, and well-popped. So good texture and just the right crunch. The flavour wasn't particularly evenly distributed with some of the popcorn tasting of not very much while other bits were maple syrupy or bacony or both. But I felt that wasn't a bad thing.

David at work thought my bag of popcorn was very smelly (lucky thing I haven't attempted some much smellier crunchy snacks in the office) and tried a handful. He thought the bacon flavour followed the maple sweetness too quickly but he finished his handful. Ruth also tried some and didn't complain. Most of the people I work with are a bit conservative in their crispy snack tastes. I'm trying to educate them but it's an uphill struggle!

I thought this popcorn was OK. A good mix of sweet and savoury. Fun packaging design; the snowman is rather charming. M&S have special sandwiches supporting Shelter, the housing and homeless charity, each Christmas. I had the Brie & Grape Shelter sandwich today. It's very good. I've not noticed Shelter crispy snacks before. I think it's a good idea but perhaps I would? Weirdly though it was really difficult to any reference to this popcorn online.

It's good to know that 5p from the sale of each packet goes to Shelter. Give it a try if you can. On sale for the Christmas season only I should think.