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!