Easy haggis

One of these days Stephen and I are going to kill a sheep and make a proper haggis, using the lungs (unavailable to buy in New Zealand) as well as the liver and heart, and stuffing it into the stomach.

In the mean time I was feeling haggis-ish after going to my Scottish stepmother's funeral at the beginning of the week so I made cheating haggis.

I boiled two sheep's hearts and half a liver …

… for three hours, then left them to cool overnight. This morning I cut up the hearts …

… and minced them along with a couple of big onions …

… added the grated liver (which I forgot to photograph) and about a cup of toasted oat groats, …

… which are the closest thing to steel cut oats we can get in New Zealand, along with as much of the water the meat was boiled in …

… as was needed to make a sloppy mixture:

I had run out of suet so I used olive oil instead, and used far less of it than the cup or so of suet I should have added. Real haggis is pretty fattening and unhealthy.

I seasoned it with salt and quite a lot of black pepper - the meat being pre cooked you can safely taste it, although the uncooked oatmeal isn't the most pleasant thing to have in your mouth.

I then half-filled two large synthetic sausage skins with the mixture, squished out the air, and tied string around the open ends:

I put them into my fish kettle full of water to cook for three hours, …

… by which time they had gone from flaccid looking half empty things to these plump beauties:

They really do swell quite considerably.

I had neither swede nor potato, so I had haggis with mashed together carrots and parsnips for my dinner:

And plum sauce.

And I have an awful lot of haggis left over. The total cost of the haggis would have been around $6-7 I'd say, and it'd happily feed six people. Very economical; Mum would have approved.