Of Home Grown Haggis and Mad Poems

Appropriate veg.

This household has always loved the haggis and has generally celebrated Burns Night despite not a one of us having any connection to Burns's countrymen save going there on holiday as a child. The college where I did my post-grad research used to do a superb feast and Liz and I even used to seek out a good Burns Night supper in a favourite pub in Kent where the hosts would "pipe the beast in" properly. We had our tame authentic Scot (Rest in Peace, Joe Cosgrove of the sea-dog leathery skin, gruff Merchant Mariner accents and salty sailorman grey beard; we will never forget your renditions of Address to the Haggis) do the poem.

Bud break in quince.

Now that we are doing the small-holder thing and have our own lambs, we can make our own haggis, of course, and this Liz does every year. Haggis tends to use the more 'gribbly' bits of lamb, heart, lungs and what are euphemistically called 'trimmings' - the bits of edge and end which the butcher will not sell when he is cleaning up a nice joint for the shop display. We now arrange with our own slaughterman/butcher to give us back the 'offal' on the day after slaughter, and then keep all the trimmings a week later when we go down to see the carcasses butchered up.

'Steak Lady's daffs looking promising.

This gap of a week makes assembling the ingredients a bit more complicated, but Liz gets round that by using this years heart and lungs 'fresh' but saving some frozen trimmings from last year to go in with them. Our other peculiarity is that we found that you do not need to stuff the ingredients into a bit of gut, a mad made "cover" or a sheep's stomach (the latter would be huge anyway!), but can make a 'tray-bake' version in the oven.

The surviving half dozen young Buffs
3 hens and 3 roosters.

I don't often do recipes on this blog but here, for the sake of it, is the recipe Liz uses from the BBC website but adapted for home use after point 4.

Haggis

This is an authentic recipe from Scotland and the ingredients and methods of cooking may be unfamiliar but we hope you enjoy the results.

Ingredients

Heart and lungs of one lamb
450g/1lb beef or lamb trimmings, fat and lean
2 onions, finely chopped
225g/8oz oatmeal
1 tbsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground dried coriander
1 tsp mace
1 tsp nutmeg
water, enough to cook the haggis
stock from lungs and trimmings

Preparation method

1. Wash the lungs, heart and liver (if using). Place in large pan of cold water with the meat trimmings and bring to the boil. Cook for about 2 hours.
2. When cooked, strain off the stock and set the stock aside.
3. Mince the lungs, heart and trimmings.
4. Put the minced mixture in a bowl and add the finely chopped onions, oatmeal and seasoning. Mix well and add enough stock to moisten the mixture. It should have a soft crumbly consistency.
5. (Liz's edit) Brush a lidded casserole with melted lamb fat and put the mixture in. Press either a butter wrapper or a greased piece of tin foil down on top of the mixture, cover with the lid. Bake for one and a half hours at 180ºC.

These seed heads can go onto the
compost now the birds are done with them

So there you go. We will be enjoying ours with home grown mashed spuds and 'bashit neeps' even though the accompanying 'dram' will be Irish Jameson whiskey (with an E) or possibly poitín as we don't have any Scotch in the house.

Meanwhile, I have resisted temptation to paste in a chunk of the famous (Fair fa' etc) poem but this is because we have our own semi-homegrown madness to publish. I don't have a great deal to do with the social media system 'Twitter'. I have an account and it can be diverting but I think it only works if you have a smart phone and the time to be always on it. People post up what ever they are thinking at the time and then move on, so it is by definition ephemeral. When I go onto a computer twice a day or there-abouts, morning and evening, I would have to scroll back through hundreds of these little quips just to catch up; there would be no point. 

Goose, duck and chicken eggs.

Occasionally, though, one of these people with, probably, too much time on their hands does have a moment of inspiration and creates or shares something which catches the attention with its sheer lunacy or amusement value. Liz spotted one of these last night; an "app" which creates a poem out of the 'tweets' you have posted ('tweeted'). You can choose from a choice of three poetry styles; Liz went with 'Rondel' and sent the app off beavering away to find my (thin and far between) tweets which are mainly about farming and small-holdering. 

We can now bring you, by the magic of Twitter, the following masterpiece which may one day make it to the English canon and your grand-children's school-book anthology. Or not.

On goats

by Matt Care

Probably not that impressed by the poem, but happy
not to be in the haggis. Feste the lamb is getting very
big now. 

We have control over the spend?

Place or I'll be in the dog 'ouse.

Through to Ivy at the December end.

You need an excuse?

Damn! Puts down Visa-debit card.

Smaller ones so now I have 2 pairs.

You'll be grand. Welcome aboard!

Westie dogs barking from upstairs!

Cracking image!

Old names, though, don't you agree?

The onion'. One in every village?

Was caught munching on the fig tree

Can't beat a topp sausage.

..... Follow that Rabbie Burns :-) !!!

Joe Cosgrove

I promised you a tale of salty sailor men. None came saltier looking or more gravelly voiced than Mum and Dad's erstwhile friend and pub-quiz team member, Joe Cosgrove, with his old grey stubbly face and ruddy, gale-lashed complexion. Glaswegian and low-pitched, you'd think he was straight off a Clyde fishing boat and he was, in working life, a Merchant Seaman

He quizzed, with Mum and Dad, in the Shepherd Neame league, for the Anchor pub years back (before Megan was even born), and was always accompanied by scruffy, straggly ancient westie Gertie (whose name Joe pronounced with a good Glaswegian rolled "r" Ayeee.... Gurrrrrrrti' !). Gertie was completely disreputable looking, but had in her pedigree, some Italian Champions.

At the time Mum and Dad had no dog, but they all made a fuss of Gertie, who became effectively the team mascot, coming to all the quizzes ("we" wouldn't go in any pubs who didn't allow dogs!) and sitting quietly beside Joe for the duration. Mum and Dad would occasionally meet Joe out for a dog walk, where he'd usually have Gertie, but also his daughter's three scotties who, if Dad recalls, had names like "Towser" and "Aggie"

Dad, at the time, was hankering after a long haired Goldie, but resisteing temptation due to the muddy dog-returning-from-walk scenario described previously. When they fell in love with Gertie, the talk turned to "Well maybe we'll have a westie and Goldie - that would be a good combination". My Sister (Ellie)'s mum actually had that combo when Mum and Dad first knew her - the goldie called Bonnie, the westie called Suki, actually Megan's half sister (same mother).

Soon, they went ahead with the Westie so Megan appeared on the scene, and soon after that, Haggis , and these two went the occasional walk with Gertie and the scotties (3 whites - 3 blacks!).

Not long after that "we" stopped quizzing and had not seen Joe for a few months, when we heard from his Daughter that Joe had sadly passed away, laughing fit to bust a joke someone had cracked in a restaurant. We know he'd have wanted to go in some way like that, Bless him. She'd been trying to contact Mum and Dad but hadn't got hold of a number, and the funeral had been the day before. Mum and Dad offered, but the daughter had wanted to keep Gertie and see her through her autumn years.

That was all 8 or 9 years ago now, so we dare say Gertie has also passed away, but Mum and Dad will never forget Joe or Gertie, indeed, every time they look at us they can't help remembering her and therefore him.

Nice story...

Deefer