Haggis

After my previous exploits into sausages, salami and black pudding, today saw the last such effort for the moment – gluten-free haggis. Being based on oats means that Anne has never had haggis (because she’s coeliac and can’t eat wheat, oats, barley or rye). However, we had a cunning plan: substitute quinoa, a South American grain that has an oddly persistent crunchy/chewy ring around each seed.

So I took my sheep’s pluck (lungs, heart and liver), boiled them for a couple of hours, then minced them, added the quinoa, suet and seasoning, placed the mixture into skins and boiled for a further 3 hours. The results were gratifyingly haggis-like:

My advice to any other would-be haggis makers is, have a go – it’s rather easier than most sausage-like things to make. Do tie your knots in the skins well, and allow plenty of room for the skins to shrink – just over half full seemed about right for me.

Sadly, I included too much liver in the mix (some of the recipes I saw said to use only half of it, but most said to use all of it, which was what I did), so I found the result not as much to my taste as I’d hoped. Anne, however, loved it :-) As did Ruth, our 10-month-old!