Burns Night supper: Haggis, neeps and tatties pie, baby carrots, roast red onions and greens with beetroot sauce. Cranachan with chocolate flapjack cookies.

  

It’s been a fair bit since I posted anything and admittedly Burns Night was quite a while ago. But I’ve got one of those annoying ‘job’ things that I’ve had to do (for like money and stuff) and honestly haven’t had the time to write anything. 

Ah well, best get back into it I suppose! Back in January it was Burns Night – I haven’t got a bit of Scottish in me, not one bit, can’t even claim the tiniest piece of me being Scottish. Quite like the place though; Edinburgh is up there with my favourite cities in the world. I’ve been there a few times with Uni, stag do’s and doing Tough Mudder a few years ago. During the ‘Mudder’ visit (and after a few sherbets) I had haggis pizza; mind – blown! Never had haggis before and even though it’s made from the bits of the sheep that you don’t normally eat (heart, lungs, liver, lips, eyelids, bleat) it somehow tasted really nice! Took me completely by surprise. 

It seems the traditional way of having haggis, neeps and tatties is just kind of plonked on a plate. I’d been trying to think of a way to jazz it up a bit for a few months and getting nowhere, then I saw a Facebook post off a friend who did it all in a pie. I thought ‘that’s a good idea Hols’ so I stole it! (After telling her that I would, got permission and everything)

The haggis was pretty easy to get hold of; it was just sat there in the meat aisle. And again the turnips and potatoes (neeps and tatties) were in the fruit and veg part of any supermarket. I’m not 100% sure how to officially cook haggis but once it was open it looked a lot like cooked minced beef so I decided to use it just like that. The pie method was pretty simple:

• Fry the haggis with some onion
• Chop the swede and potato into small (sugar cube size) chunks and roast in the oven until just cooked 
• Get some short crust and puff pastry (I always use ready-rolled; life’s too short to worry about puff pastry!) and line a tin with the short crust
• Fill the pastry with a mix of the haggis, neeps and tatties 
• Put a puff pastry lid on top and brush some egg wash over the top 
• Return to the oven until the pastry is cooked (about 1/2 hour or so)

The accompaniments to the pie included roast red onions and Tom Kerridge’s awesome Christmas carrots: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/christmas_carrots_90489

And some green stuff I found in Tesco (a mix of cabbage and leek). The beetroot sauce is a phenomenal cheats recipe; it is essentially some grated pickled beetroot that you get from a jar and added to gravy. Simple but severely yummy, you don’t need to slave over a stove for hours pickling the beets and then reducing and altering the sauce until it’s just right. Sometimes the simple options work out the best! It was then just a case of getting the pie out the oven and playing the food up. 

And then pretending you’re Scottish. 

The dessert (pic below) was my take on Cranachan. Cranachan is usually made with whipped cream but I found that to be a bit too rich for me, so I used thick Greek yoghurt  instead. 

To make the granola and oat cookies I pretty much followed the following recipe from Bake Off (but took out the stem ginger, not because I wanted to – I just didn’t have any to hand) : 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/classic_stem_ginger_83286
Cranachan is a nice easy dessert to bash out: 

• Once the cookies are baked let them cool and smash up a couple of them
• Mix some Greek yoghurt, a dram (or two) of whisky and some icing sugar
• Put a layer of the smashed cookies on the bottom of whichever dish you’re going to eat from, then the whiskey-yoghurt mix, then some raspberry sauce and finally some more of the cookies
• Add a few fresh raspberries for aesthetical reasons 
• Put a couple of the cookies (covered in some chocolate) on the side and shovel into your face

 

And there you go, a kinda Burns Night supper. 

Prep time: Around 1/2 an hour for measuring, mixing, peeling etc

Cooking time: About 45 minutes for the cookies, 90 minutes for the pie (including 10 mins for the haggis/onion, 30 mins for the neeps&tatties, and pie in oven time), 20 mins for the carrots, 5 mins for the greens and sauce. The cranachan can be put together in about 5 minutes. 

7.5/10: Pretty good, but in all honesty I don’t thing I’ll make haggis in its usual form again. It’s just too much of a strong flavour that overpowered everything else. Will probably use it as a flavour enhancer in meat dishes though! Defo making the Cranachan and cookies again, they brought the score up from a 5/10 to a 7.5. 

Chocolate pecan pie, whiskey ice cream and caramelised clementines

  

Another one (on order!) from the Cafe Paradiso book (A Paradiso Year: Autumn and Winter Cooking https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0953535371/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_U.7kwb6NP2VSX ), I was going to have a bash at somethig else but when the recipe was shown to me it kinda just screamed out ‘MAKE ME!!!!’; I mean chocolate, pecans, ice cream, whiskey, caramelised fruit – what is not to like?! The recipe looked pretty easy to make too, the only bit that I was a tad wary of was the ice cream; not because it looked tricky to do but because I didn’t have an ice cream maker and wasn’t hugely keen on buying one. If I did it would just spend most of the time languishing in the back of a cupboard somewhere, and they ain’t too cheap either!  

 

Once I’d defrosted some shortcrust pastry from the freezer I rolled it out and blind baked it for about 20 minutes until it was just cooked. Then (my sister will be happy to hear) as I hadn’t made this before I decided to follow the above recipe for the filling; however I found that this made way too much for the size pastry case that I had made so had to improvise and fill a few muffin cases with the leftovers. Then it was put back in the oven until it looked set.

  

Then it was the turn of the ice cream and clementines, I veered slightly off course here primarily because I have a serious problem with sugar syrup; we plain just don’t get along! So instead I heated up some of the remaining maple syrup and put the clementines in there for a few minutes until they were hot. The ice cream I blatantly just cheated with; there was no way I was going to fork out to buy an ice cream maker so I just did the following:

• Bought some good quality ice cream
• Left it out of the freezer for a few minutes until it had gone a little sloppy 
• Added a few wee drams of good whiskey (my tipple of choice was Haig Club)
• Stirred it inwell 
• Chucked it back in the freezer

Then it was just a matter of putting it all in a plate and resisting the urge to thow it in your face before it was actually on the plate!

Prep time: About 30 mins

Cooking time: Around an hour or so

8/10: Whiskey ice cream and the clementines were phenomenal, the pie itself was very nice but far too sweet for me. Next time (and there definitly will be a next time) I will use more chocolate and less sugar.