So, following on from Thursday’s haggis hunting post, the three lambs’ plucks continued to boil and change in colour and consistency. The lungs kept bobbing to the top of the pan like jostling whales.

Taking it out of the fridge over 24 hours later, it didn’t look so pretty and had a hardened layer of fat on top.

I continued the challenge with Mei on Saturday and was so glad to have her company; this is not a task I’d want to do on my own and Mei made it into a fun, surreal, slightly hysterical afternoon! Still following Tim Hayward’s recipe, we cut the heart and lungs into chunks and then pulsed them in the magimix until finely chopped, but not pate-like.

Cutting up lung was interesting. We decided to remove many of the larger tubes running though it, as they didn’t look particularly appetising. The heart was meaty and I’d like to try cooking it as a separate dish sometime, perhaps gentley sauteing, rather than simmering the hell out of it. The smell of the magimixed offal was really unpleasant and horribly reminiscent of cat food, so we spent a good half an hour not breathing through our noses.

Mei began to grate the liver, and then decided it would easier magimixed too. We mixed the meat with six finely chopped onions and then seasoned it with plenty of salt, white pepper, mace, finely chopped thyme and dried sage. It finally started to smell good.

In went 1.5kg of beef suet…

…and a 1.5kg of Hamlyn’s Scottish pinhead oatmeal, John McCann’s steel cut Irish oatmeal and some plain, rolled oats, all toasted in the oven. I bought the former two at Selfridges, only to discover that you can just buy plain bags of oatmeal at Morrisons, and presumably other supermarkets, for a tenth of the price.

We hand-mixed and tasted and seasoned until happy.

Then we had to find a way of cooking it, as had been unsuccessful in the ox bung/sheep stomach mission. After Weschenfelder failed to deliver my ox bung on Friday or Saturday, I rang Jack O’Shea butchers at Selfridges to see if they had managed to procure a sheep’s stomach. They had! So I jumped on the bus down to Oxford Street, only to find a very apologetic butcher, whose colleague had given it away to someone else. I was so upset that he gave me the biggest haggis I’ve ever seen for half price. It weighs more than my scales will tell me, but I’m guessing it’s about 2.5kg.

So, what with that and the homemade stuff we had a lot of haggis to play with. For dinner we tried haggis five ways, with some neaps and tatties (mashed swede and potato):

1) Wrapped in cling film and foil, placed in a baking tray of water and steamed in the oven.

2) Oven-roasted.

3) Pan-fried.

4) Rolled into balls, dipped in beer batter and deep fried.

5) In a stroke of inspiration that came to us at precisely the same strange moment, we hollowed out an English muffin and stuffed it full of haggis, then deep fried it. It was heavenly: a meaty donut, crisp on the outside and moist on the inside.

I’d like to try making haggis scotch eggs: boiled quails eggs wrapped in haggis and then in breadcrumbs. Mei said she’d like to make haggis dumplings.

Tomorrow night at Rambling we won’t be deep frying the haggis, as I don’t want to give anyone a heart attack, what with the battered Mars bars for pudding as well. But we will all be reading from the book above:

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face
Great chieftan o’ the Puddin’ race!
From them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my arm.

This more or less translates as:

Fair is your honest happy face
Great chieftain of the pudding race!
Above them all you take your place,
Stomach, tripe or guts:
Well are you worthy of a grace
As long as my arm.

Personally, I agree. I’ve always loved haggis and think homemade stuff is particularly delicious.

Lamb’s pluck is not that easy to get hold of. After trying a range of butchers, all of whom seemed to think that making my own haggis was a bit insane and needed a good few days to get hold of any, I tried the excellent  Marky Market. He rang me, as requested, from Smithfield meat market at 4am on Wednesday to tell me what was on offer. I’ve been having Delicatessen-style dreams about sheep organs ever since.

A few hours later he arrived with a bag of three lambs’ plucks, delivered straight to my door and up four flights of stairs.

I was shocked but quite excited by the fact that all the organs were still joined together and the blood bright red, as if the lamb’s insides had been pulled out just that minute.

Today I started following Tim Hayward’s step-by-step instructions to his haggis challenge last year. I must say, the fact that he isn’t doing it again this year made me worry that it might be an extremely disgusting process…

Feeling a bit like a wicked witch in a fairytale I separated the livers and and cut out the hearts of the three plucks. This was pretty simple and just involved just one gutsy stroke for each. I then set about cutting the gristly windpipe from the lungs. Washing these was a strange sensation. I’ve never seen or felt lungs before; they were large and strangely smooth and soft, like liver but lighter. I ran water through the heart ventricles and got rather a shock as I put my finger in to rinse out any blood clots and was spurted with a gush of bloody liquid. I’ve always quite liked handling liver and once when I was little my nanny threw an uncooked liver at my older sister’s pristine friend and we ended up having a liver fight. Not today. Concentrate on the haggis.

I’ve put everything except the strange looking windpipes into my big stockpot, covered them in cold water and brought to the boil. Very strange and exciting things seem to be happening in there right now: the lungs, having turned a deeper purple and part white, are refusing not to float and there is a mixture of pink bubbles and brown froth forming.

After a couple of hours I’ll turn off the bubbling pot and leave the plucks to soak in their cooking juices overnight. Either tomorrow or Saturday I’m hoping that an ox bung will be delivered in an envelope by Weschenfelder. If not, I’ve been assured by Oliver Thring, who is also making haggis, that something clever can be done with cling film and foil. I’ll make the actual haggis mix this weekend, with the help of Mei, who has never seen a haggis before and is enormously excited by the prospect of grating liver.

If the thought of all this gore doesn’t send shivers up your spine, come join us on Monday night for a three-course dinner at Rambling Restaurant Burns’ Night. There will be homemade haggis-stabbing, neaps, tatties and poetry!

Mei and I were seated at a long table with a whole host of interesting people from a variety of countries. There were a couple of other smaller tables too and couple of foodbloggers I recognised – Magnus and Beth.

The attention to detail was stunning, with each napkin made of a different material, bottles of tapwater and bowls of buttery, chilli popcorn to nibble on. The table was not so much clothed as wrapped in brown parcel paper and had the menu and little notes written all over it, encouraging us to interact with our neighbours to find out what we’d be eating.

We started with a dish I recognised from Ashburton cookery school: homemade tortelli filled with goats cheese and orange pepper, with a fresh pesto sauce and topped with a deep fried basil leaf. This was followed by lamb loin with creamy dauphinoise potatoes, crunchy green beans, mushrooms and a heavenly madeira sauce. We were also served with an amuse-bouche of lemongrass and coconut sorbet served in a spoon.

A trio of desserts was brought out with a flourish and plenty of ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhhhs’ from fellow diners. The Turkish delight cheesecake was a recipe from Marcus Wareing’s new book Nutmeg & Custard, but Lex had put her own twist on it, creating a topping of pomegranate floss from her local Turkish grocer. It was so good I nearly fell off my chair.

We were served with pink bubbly to start and Australian muscat plus coffee or tea to finish. All in all, a truly satisfying meal in stylish surroundings, hosted with real care and attention. Looking forward to your Banjo Patterson night ladies!

A couple of weeks ago some friends and I headed to Skipness, on western Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre, for a 30th birthday party, or as a Glaswegian taxi driver put it: “a real test of friendship”. A train ride from London to Glasgow, followed by a mad rush to the bus station and a bumpy three hour ride up the Scottish coast did seem like a bit of a challenge, but when we got there we understood why he’d chosen this spectacularly isolated location. Where else can you find an abundance of firewood to cook a whole deer in the ground, dance a ceilidh in pitch darkness, eat the freshest of oysters, get windburn and see 10 rainbows?

Nick had procured, skinned and butchered a deer. The aim was to cook it in a pit oven.  This method of cooking is called Hāngi by the New Zealand Māori and is also used at Hawaiian luaus and for the clam bakes of New England. I did gather some firewood but unfortunately missed the digging of the pit, as was meandering up the lane picking blackberries.

The blackberries weren’t quite ripe, it being the end of August and not quite blackberry season. We did find a few though…

…and boiled them down with some sugar to make a blackberry jam marinade for the venison ribs:

Dr Sid sliced up the ribs and we smothered them in the jam, left them to marinade and then grilled them on a cunning little grill made of stones lined up in the sand.

Meanwhile, the fire pit had been stoked with wood and volcanic stone. This was left to burn down to smouldering embers.

The deer was then wrapped in seaweed, surrounded by the hot stones, covered over with turf and left to cook for five hours. It came out tender and well-cooked, if a little sandy! 30 people gorged themselves on the ribs (savoury and sweet), hunks of venison with salads and a pavlova for pudding. The day after I cooked up the leftover deer with chillies and tomatoes into a thick pasta sauce. We seemed to spend the whole weekend eating, and as well as the centrepiece deer, had delicious curry and dal made by kitchen queen Amy, roast squashes, stuffed mushrooms, picnic lunches and full English breakfasts…

On Sunday we headed to the Skipness Seafood Cafe for a change from rich game and took our fill of fresh crab, langoustine, the tastiest hot-smoked and cold-smoked salmon, queen scallops in garlic butter and fresh oysters. Delicious.

The journey back to London took 15 hours and involved a missed bus, some slugs, a hire car, Loch Fyne Oyster Bar, walking through Glasgow wearing wellies and covered in mud, a bucket of coffee, three trains and a taxi from Birmingham that was shockingly laid on by the train company. Oh, and a bottle of whiskey. It was definitely worth it.

The estate we were on has six lovely holiday cottages, which are reasonably priced and available all year round. To book a holiday in Skipness call 01880 760 207 and speak to Sophie.

It was a lot like making pastry: work flour and fat (oil) into crumbs, add water to make into a dough, rest and roll out. But I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet…

My chapatis didn’t puff up in the pan like they did in the video. They just sort of stayed hard and flat. You’re meant to press down on the bubbles that form, so forcing the air into other parts of the chapati. When I did this, either the air refused to budge or I popped a hole in the dough so it escaped altogether. Each one got a little easier though, until they were just about decent and half puffed up.

Ingredients (serves 6-8 as a side dish, 3-4 as a main):

200g closed cup mushrooms

250g frozen peas (matar)

2 onions

4 tomatoes

4 green cardamoms

An inch of cinnamon stick (not too crumbly or you will end up picking bits of cinnamon out of your teeth)

Fresh ginger (about 2 inches squared)

3 cloves garlic

1 packet unsalted, uncooked cashew nuts

1 tbsp chilli powder

1 tbsp corriander powder

1 tsp tumeric

1 tsp garam masala

1 tbsp vegetable oil

salt to taste

1) Finely chop onions and fry on a low heat vegetable oil with the cardamoms and cinnamon stick until the onions are translucent.

2) Meanwhile grate the ginger (you can leave the skin on) and peel and crush the garlic. Add these to the pan and stir.

3) Chop the tomatoes into eighths, add to the pan and cook gently, stirring often for about ten minutes.

4) Meanwhile simmer the cashew nuts in in a small pan, with just enough water to cover them, for five minutes. Take off the heat and blend to a paste, adding water as you go if the mixture is too sticky.

5) Add the chilli, corriander, tumeric, garam masala and salt to the onion pan mixture and cook for two minutes.

6) Add the cashew nut mixture to the pan along with a cup of water. Stir thoroughly and bring to the boil.

6) Meanwhile wash the mushrooms (I don’t really believe in the brushing v washing debate) and chop into quarters.

7) Add the mushrooms and peas to the pan and cook until the mushrooms are tender but not mushy – about five minutes.

The other is the contents of a vanilla pod floating atop of a pan full of double cream and milk…

Vanilla Icecream (from Gordon Ramsay’s Just Desserts – makes just over half a litre of incredibly rich icecream)

250ml whole milk
250ml double cream
50g caster sugar
1-2 vanilla pods
6 large free-range egg yolks

1) Put a bowl in the fridge to chill at least a few hours before making this recipe. Also, if you are using an icecream maker, make sure it has been in the freezer for at least 8 hours, preferably overnight.

2) Put the milk and cream in a heavy-based saucepan with 1 tablespoon of the sugar. Split open the vanilla pod(s) and scrape the seeds into the mixture. Add the empty pod(s) too.  Slowly bring to the boil.

3) Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks and sugar together with a balloon whisk until pale and creamy.

4) When the vanilla cream mixture is about to boil, take off the heat and pour about a third into the eggs, whisking well. Then pour the rest in slowly, whisking continuously.

5) Return the mixture to the pan and cook on low, stirring continuously until you are able to coat the back of your wooden spoon with the mixture. Careful not to overcook it.

6) Remove from the heat and strain through a sieve into the chilled bowl. Place in the fridge to chill and stir occasionally to make sure no skin forms on the top.

7) Then pour into a shallow container and freeze. Take it out and beat thorougly at least three times during the freezing process. If you have an icecream maker, just pour the mixture into the clever machine and be smug.

Beach photo by Mora McLagan.

Ingredients
1kg(2.25lb) of cooked roast goose plucked off your christmas bird (this post is a little late so maybe next year’s bird; alternatively start afresh using uncooked chicken chopped into bite size pieces)
300ml(1/2 pint) natural yoghurt
6 garlic cloves
25g(1oz) fresh ginger
1 medium size red chilli
2 tspn freshly ground pepper
2 tspn whole cumin seeds
2 tspn whole coriander seeds
1 tspn cloves
1 tspn tumeric
1 tspn ground cinnamon
60g(2.5oz) butter
3 small onions
300ml(10fl oz) coconut milk
1 tin chopped tomatoes
small bunch coriander, chopped
1 lime

1) Crush garlic, grate ginger, de-seed and finely chop the chilli. Mix with the yoghurt in a big bowl and add the goose. (If using uncooked chicken allow to marinade in the fridge for a few hours or overnight, then cook on a baking tray at 250C for 10-15 minutes).

2) Gently warm all the spices except the cinnamon in a pan for 1-2 minutes, then grind to a fine powder.

3) Slice the onions and soften in the butter, add the freshly ground spices, plus the cinnamon, and cook for five minutes.

4) Add the coconut milk little by little and continue to cook until the onions are completely soft. Mix in half the tin of tomatoes.

5) Liquidise the mixture and then return it to the pan. Add the goose (or cooked chicken), the rest of the tomatoes and the fresh coriander.

6) Reheat, add lime juice and seasoning to taste – it should be mild, creamy and delicious.

Ingredients (will make 30-40 macarons):

For the macarons
350g icing sugar
250g ground almonds
egg whites of 5 large eggs
150g caster sugar
food colouring

For the filling
200g foie gras
50g unsalted butter
small amount of double cream
small amount of port

1) Sift the almonds and icing sugar to get a fine powder.

2) Whisk up the egg whites with a pinch of salt, add the caster sugar and beat until you have a stiff and glossy meringue mixture. Add food colouring of your choice. I chose purple and the macarons turned out an interesting pale green on the outside and violet on the inside

3) Preheat the oven to 160c.

4) Using a plastic spatula, mix the dry ingredients with the meringue mixture throroughly, trying to knock the air back out of it. Do this until smooth and shiny. If you tip the bowl to one side slightly and cut the mixture upwards with the spatula, it should take 9 to 12 seconds for the goo to run back down.

4) Use a piping bag to pipe macarons onto greaseproof paper lined baking trays. Let the tip of the piping bag rest on the greaseproof paper at a 45 degree angle and twist the bag at the end, creating just enough pressure to make perfectly circular macaron blobs.

5) To get the air bubbles out of the macarons (this supposedly stops them cracking open in the oven), drop the trays onto the worktop hard.

6) Let the macarons dry for 15 minutes at room temperature.

7) Meanwhile make the filling: blend the foie gras with the butter, then stir in the port and the cream bit by bit to make sure the mixture doesn’t get too sloppy. Put in the fridge.

7) Cook the macarons for 15-20 minutes in the oven. Leave to cool on the tray, then sandwich together with the foie gras filling.

I really recommend listening to Paprika Balkanicus whilst making jelly – their songs are at just the right tempo for sprinkling gelatin and dancing around the kitchen in a jelly-like manner. Dr. Oetker’s sachets (available in most supermarkets) seem to work as well as fine leaf gelatine, but can come out a bit lumpy, so I recommend sieving the mixture when you pour it into the jelly mould. Finding moulds was not as easy as I’d thought. I found a few antique copper ones at Spitalfields market – see the post below – and also managed to find a ‘brioche mould’ at a hardware shop, which seemed to do the trick. Maplins sells blacklights.

Warning: try not to make the delicate raspberry coulis make your jelly look like the aftermath of a murder…

Wobbly jelly facts from Bompas & Parr (number 10 is my favourite):

1. Jelly was first eaten by the Egyptians

2. The gelling agent used in most jellies is gelatine, and is sourced from animals. Berfore leaf gelatine was invented shaved hart’s (young deer’s) horns and the swim bladders of fish called sturgeon were used to make jelly.

3. Jelly used to be a food that only the rich could afford. It was hard work to make, exotic fruit was expensive and there were no refrigerators.

4.The Victorians were experts at making complicated jelly moulds. A shape for the jelly was of a British lion sitting on a plinth.

5. In the past savoury jellies were just as popular as sweet jellies. At Bompas & Parr we’ve even made zebra and crocodile jelly.

6. Some fruits like pineapple won’t set as jellies as they contain enzymes that break down the protein bonds. Others like blackberry and strawberry make wonderful jellies.

7. Gelatin the main gelling agent for jelly was used as a blood plasma substitute during World War II.

8. In 1997 the Army’s Logistics Corp helped to make the biggest jelly at Blackpool Zoo. The jelly was almost one metre tall by seven metres wide and took about 12 hours to set with a blast chiller.

9. If you eat too much jelly it can be a mild laxative!

10. On March 17, 1993, technicians at St. Jerome hospital in Batavia tested a bowl of lime jelly with an EEG machine and confirmed the earlier testing by Dr. Adrian Upton that a bowl of wobbling jelly has brain waves identical to those of adult men and women.

11. Jelly doesn’t wobble underwater.