Saturday 29 July 2023

General Haggis Recipe (meat or vegetarian)

Filling - lamb/lamb lung and offal/Veggies 1kg (this is the cooked weight, so when using meat 1.25kg raw meat)

Fat -  200g butter (or vegan alternative) + 50g flour (cornflour if wanting gluten free) or 250g suet

Pinhead Oats (also called steel cut oats) 350g

Onion - 2 medium approx 400g

Liquid 600ml - veg or meat stock. When making veggie I used the cooking water from the lentils and some marmite, some veg stock and maybe worcester sauce. For meat ideally use the liquid you cooked the meat in

Spice  - eg

2tsp salt approx, you need to taste the mix. Salted butter or marmite will also add salt

3 tsp ground pepper (or 1tsp pepper and 2 cayenne pepper)

1 tsp ground coriander seed

1 tsp nutmeg (or mace)

1 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tbsp vinegar (but not needed when you use olives in the veggie version)

For the vegetarian option you can use anything you fancy for the filler, but consider how much flavour lamb has, you need to add this somehow.

Popular flavour enhancers are marmite, worcester sauce or soya paste, consider the volume of liquid if you use worcester sauce.


250g black beans (cooked - I used Cassegrain tinned haricot noire with Lemon grass and combava leaves)

100g mushrooms

180g carrot (2 largish carrots)

250g cooked green lentils (125g dried lentils)

150 g cooked black lentils (75g dried)

30g peanut butter

40g olives 


Cook the lentils (reserve the liquid to use with the stock), grate the carrot, chop the mushrooms and olives small and mash the black beans

Mix everything together all these ‘filling’ ingredients

Fry the onions gently in the butter until soft not brown

Mix with the veg mixture and add the liquid, flour and pin head oats.

Add all the spices.

Mix well

Should now be sloppy but not wet.

Put in to foil trays or loaf tins and cover with foil and cook in a 140°C oven for 2 hours (or steam in a pan)

When cooked the pinhead oats will be soft and have grown a lot in size (maybe 3 or 4 times the size they started off) and the mix will no longer be sloppy, it may be lightly browned.

Let cool and can be frozen at this point. 

To reheat cook in oven at 150 for about an hour mins. I like to leave the foil off for half that time so it goes a bit crispy, but this may not be highly traditional.

Serve with mashed potato and mashed turnip - or any veg you want!


Ready to out in the trays and cook


Cooked (twice) and ready to eat.
Failed to take a pic of it on the plate as too busy scoffing :)



Wednesday 26 July 2023

Soft bread rolls recipe

1 egg plus warm water to make 150g of liquid 

1 tsp active dry yeast 

250 g bread flour 

15 g sugar 

1 tsp salt 

25 g soft butter


Knead everything together for 10 mins or whatever you normally do for bread

Put in a bowl and rise until doubled in size. Approx an hour.

Divide in to 4 rolls in an oiled oven tray and let double in size again

Cook in the tray for about 20 mins until lightly browned



Sunday 23 July 2023

Just need the tiling done…

Need to finish the bit over the septic tank too so we can get rid of the hardboard…


Saturday 22 July 2023

Food food food

 Sweetpeas and runner beans


Crispy aromatic duck


Biggest cucumber I have grown! I have mixed success with cucumbers generally…


Courgettes got out of control, made some soup


Pizza with home grown and not home grown pineapple

Wednesday 19 July 2023

Happy 15th Anniversary!

 


15th wedding anniversary, strange weather, but enjoyed eating outside anyway

Special champagne


Giant beef chop

With veg from a friend. Yum!




Wednesday 12 July 2023

Sheep shearing time again

We are loving the head holder so we can shear them standing up (them not us - although we do think about making a bench for them to stand on one day). The sheep much prefer it this way too - it seems they didn’t read the ‘How to be a sheep’ handbook where it mentions going floppy when lying on your back…



Shearing a bit later than usual this year, partially due to the work on the house and partially because the cool wet weather has taken away the urgency…