Sheeps bits, samosas and a helicopter

 

 

Haggis samosas?  Haggis?

 

I think I'd be happy to try that.  Just been watching the excellant Hairy Bikers and a Mum Knows Best repeat. I like haggis and I like samosas so it's a done deal. Not that I've enjoyed haggis for a while.  When one of my sons was into rugby, the club organised an annual fundraiser Burns Night.  Very few on our table actually enjoyed the haggis or the tot of whisky to pour onto it.  And yet they went year after year. Meanwhile as a significant fan of both those items, I would leave the Ball roughly the same shape/dimensions of a haggis, wobbling due to  having consumed vast amounts of sheeps bits and whisky.  Whether it was the alarming shift in my centre of gravity due to bloated stomach or the alcohol, I can't be certain.

Thinking back to why so many of my fellow diners shunned the menu, I suppose there's a clue in the ingredients: sheep's pluck (heart, liver and lungs to you and me) with more mainstream onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, all plopped into a sheeps stomach and boiled until it's given up the fight.  It's widely believed that it's of Scottish origin but there are records of a dish answering to a vague description in Lancashire in 1430. Let's not get involved, there's heritage at  stake here.

Pigs trotters with a hoof

 

As a kid,  I waded through more than my fair share of pigs trotters and tripe.  I couldn't tell you the last time I saw either to buy. Butchers where I live opt for safe cuts they know will sell to what appears to be a squeamish market that's lost contact with food and where it comes from.  And who can blame them?  They have to make a living selling what will sell.  It's our fault, not theirs.

So imagine my surprise when I visited Birmingham some months back at the vast array of meaty bits in the covered market.  It was hard to keep my jaw from dropping.  The star of the show for me was the stall selling piles of hooves. I'm going to presume from a cow.  This is way off my radar.  I have no idea how to cook or what you do with a hoof.  Now Birmingham is about as multicultural as you could find in the UK and that would account for my ignorance, I suspect, living as I do in a small rural market town. I mean, they were sold by a butcher so eating must be the end result...yes?

Apart from eating the unusual (well, unusual by today's standards) there is also the question of eating in unusual places.

Roast dinner followed by a roast dinner 

 

I have eaten on a gas rig in the North Sea.  That was quite some experience.  You have to get there by helicopter obviously which marks it down as unusual before you do anything else.  Inside the canteen, ignoring the fact that you are miles from anywhere and lashed by waves the size of houses, the sheer scale of the eating was legendary.  It may have changed in the years since, but it was roast followed by a roast, with roast to follow.  Seriously, vast helpings and damned tasty.

I also ate a somewhat nervy lunch with members of our armed forces in Northern Ireland during one of my previous careers. You don't forget grabbing what you can with a bunch of  anxious young men in a hurry.

But as I write this, something unusual has happened.  I look up from my laptop through the window and I see the dwindling remnants of sunshine.  We've not had much of that.  And that reminds me...

Some years ago I ran a short live radio project with a couple of colleagues and a shed load of 11 to 18s.  It was hot all week. Really hot. We had an idea.  Can you really fry an egg on a path?  Or a car bonnet? It would make a great feature.

The car thing fell on deaf ears.  The usual kind of response was; "Are you havin' a laugh?  I've just had the damned thing Turtle waxed and you want to practice your Full English?  Jog on Monkey Boy."

So we tried the path. Let me tell you, eggs don't fry on hot paths. They sort of set. Ish. And they take some scraping off later.  I guess they might somewhere, majorly hot, but not our kind of hot. Shell-shocked, I was.  Eggsactly. Oh dear.

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