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 :-) !!!

Henry and Min Re-United

In a recent post I might have worried you by finishing with a story that one of Henry or Min had gone AWOL at 'bed time' and we'd been out hunting with torches. Well, next morning  the pair were happily and noisily reunited. The missing bird had run for cover into the collection of bikes, cement mixer and other junk in the goose end of that building and kept his/her head down and kept quiet. That explains why the other bird was so contented to be up on the perch alone and also stayed quiet - he/she was presumably well aware of where the hidden bird was keeping quiet. In the morning they just had to each find their separate way to the yard and give each other a load of telling off. Not so silly after all.

Haggis mixture

In the kitchen we wind steadily on towards Christmas and even beyond. Liz converts a huge quantity of lamb "trimmings" (bits like the breast meat which the butcher would normally cut away and discard) and offal (including this year the lung which we specifically asked Ignatius to keep for us for this purpose), into home made haggis mixture. We love our haggis in this family and last year Liz found a recipe where you bake the mix in a baking tray instead of stuffing it into a piece of gut or sheep's stomach, or some kind of plastic 'cover' and it was easily the best haggis we had ever eaten. This probably because it was made with real ingredients instead of 'commercial' heaven knows what, so it is bagless haggis for us in 2014 too.

Hubbard hen at 19 weeks

Our two remaining 'Hubbard' chickens have amazed us over the last month by filling out from the rangey, gangly, big-legged adolescent shaped birds of October, to squared off, filled out, solid chicken-shaped birds now. They are 19 weeks old at this stage so they are approaching the standard 'Point of Lay' age where you'd normally buy them if you wanted them as laying birds, but these ladies are of a fast growing meat breed which the commercial boys would normally be 'finishing' at 100 days or so. Mentor Anne is keeping 2 of hers round to a fully mature age and is going to try a bit of breeding with a La Bresse rooster.

White Hubbard hen

Ours are still here for looser and more "happy chance" reasons. We had gone through a phase of 'harvesting' them, especially the roosters which were getting troublesome, and were finding them dead easy to catch because of their habit of gathering round my feet as I scooped feed from the feed bins, especially if it was raining outside. With just 2 to go, I wanted to 'do' these on the same day so that neither would be left lonely. I never got that chance and then the weather dried up and they stopped doing the under-foot thing. Also, we now had 4 birds in the freezer and needed the space for the lambs, so these two got a stay of execution and are still with us. A living larder, maybe, or perhaps we will see how they do as egg laying birds.

We've now done the run down to Silverwoods, so the lamb is all distributed to its final users. The Silverwoods have pronounced it excellent and, being as loopy as we are, found this lovely piece of lamb based 'tat' during their recent holiday in Bulgaria and thought of us. Fine, elegant tableware, I think you will agree, fit to grace the most elegant Christmas table. We have no idea why the lambs depicted are cuddling tiny teddy bears. Our lambs never had them. Perhaps it is an animal welfare thing?

Castlerea prize draw sign

We finally came to the point here where there was no longer any escaping a job which I'd been putting off and rather dreading, that of slaughtering the young geese for the Christmas table. These geese are now 6 months old and full adult size. Well, we girded our loins and got on with the job this morning with Liz, for her first time, actually getting involved and in (watching) at the kill. It went well, better than I had feared, and the boys (we are sure both these are ganders) met their end quickly, cleanly and with as much respect and as little distress as we like to ensure and they are now hanging in the Tígín awaiting the plucking and dressing job tomorrow. The relief is immense - we are now pretty much through the autumn slaughtering 'campaign' which we appreciate we have to do but cannot claim to enjoy.

There is just the one more goose to 'go', but this is our current parent bird 'Gander', he of the genetic wry-tail abnormality which he is sadly too able to pass on to his sons and daughters, so the plan is to swap him out with an unrelated gander called George who currently lives down the lane with Carolyn of the mini-horses. We get George and we deliver Gander to them but we are currently not sure whether we need to deliver him alive or whether he will be collected and despatched by K-Dub.

Finally today, we loved this Prize Draw sign seen in Castlerea (picture above) where 1st Prize is a Charolais heifer. She looks a lovely big girl from the pictures we have seen and is worth about €1000. You have the option of taking her home if you win, or immediately selling her at the Mart and going home with your money. We were laughing about what we'd do if suddenly presented with a strapping young female beef-cow. We'd have to give it to John Deere Bob to look after. We are not set up for cows' we don't even have a cattle herd number.