I've not eaten Mr Brain's Faggots for ages (just never think to buy them!) and scoffed 2 with chips and peas last night. They were delicious. 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.

Nothing too surprising in the bumph on the back of the box - theres 11% pork in the faggots, which is a mixture of pork and pork liver. Pork rind is also included as is onion and various other bits and pieces. The only E number is E150c which is (apparently) a colouring agent.

These faggots are very high in fat (12.5g per 189g cooked, ie. 2 faggots), but not too bad in the calorie stakes with only 242 cals per 2 cooked faggots. Also a HUGE carbohydrate level of 22.5g per 2 cooked faggots. So if you're following a low carb diet these might just take you over the edge!

Faggots are best cooked in the oven (Gas Mark 8 for 30 - 40 minutes), although you can microwave them (which I didn't know until I looked at the box and to be honest don't fancy the idea of mic-ed faggots) for roughly 10 minutes, stirring the sauce a couple of times. If you're going to microwave them TAKE THEM OUT OF THE FOIL PACKAGING or your microwave might blow up!

I took my faggots out of the box and was confronted with a foil carton (like you get from the chinese) covered with a card lid. You need 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! Cooking faggots is a bit of a hit & miss affair. Because they're completely hidden from view 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 are cooked at Gas Mark 8, which is the same temp as most oven chips.

Once cooked, it can be a bit fiddly to get the faggots out in one piece because the bottoms can stick to the container but I find a firm shove (for want of a better word) with the spoon will dislodge the bottoms of the faggots and they'll come out in perfect balls. They smell great, really meaty and rich.

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. Faggots are sooooo moreish - I have 2 with my dinner and couldn't really manage anymore, but they taste so lovely I think I could eat 4 if no-one else wanted any! The texture of them is good, 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 think of to liken faggots to is haggis, although haggis is much spicier and more of an acquired taste. The gravy is thick and tastes like fresh gravy - although theres a slightly synthetic aftertaste there. 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.

If you fancy some faggots tonight Asda sell the 4 packs for the bargain price of £1.00, which works out much more cost effective than spending 89p on a pack of 2 as I did yesterday.

I'll definitely buy Mr Brain's faggots 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.