IT BURNS, IT BURNS

 Well, it’s been over six months since Burns Night and a spare haggis has been lurking in the freezer since then, so it seemed time to eat it.

 

PICS MOSTLY BY CAROLINE GANNON

We couldn’t be doing with the whole neeps and tatties business (Google just autocorrected that as “neeps and tattoos”) so we thought we’d make a pie.  But the local supermarket didn’t have any ready-made pastry and we weren’t in the mood to make it from scratch, so we made a haggis shepherds pie instead.  

 

I mean it’s assemblage rather than cooking - you heat up the haggis, and yes I admit a microwave oven was involved, and then you boil and mash some perfectly ordinary potatoes, put it together and place it in a non-microwave oven for a spell, and there you have it.

 

I thought it looked all right in the pan, if a bit unnecessarily deconstructed on the plate.

 

But it tasted absolutely fine, exactly the way you’d imagine a haggis shepherds pie would.  And there were leftovers the next day.  A summer treat and no mistake.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHOAN PERFECT MASH

 I’ve always had a fondness for the state of Idaho, and since I’ve never actually been there I suppose you’d have to say that my fondness is for the IDEA of Idaho.  And this fondness is largely because of the Idaho potato.  So when I saw a packet of Idahoan Perfect Mash, instant potato mix, ‘perfect in 1 minute’ in my local supermarket, well obviously I couldn’t resist.

Now, I am not foolish enough to believe everything I read on food packaging but wouldn’t the appearance of that word ‘Buttery’ on the packet above suggest to the unwary consumer that there might be some butter in there?  No, no, don’t be so naïve.  

    The small print on the packet says it contains rapeseed, coconut and sunflower oils, milk solids, cream and buttermilk, none of which seems like a bad thing, and of course the pack doesn’t actually say that it contains butter, just that it’s buttery – and you can see why they wouldn’t say ‘rapeseedy’ on the pack.

Equally you might argue that I could add my own butter, just as I would with actual mashed potatoes, but by that token if you have to add the butter yourself, then any food in the world could be construed as buttery.

And it so happened we had some savoury spicy mince in the fridge, left over from a not particularly successful Mexican taco adventure, 

so we spiced it up some more, made and added the instant mash, and put it in the oven to make a sort of Conjunto Shepherd’s Pie.

 

And then after a while as we looked it heating in the oven, we thought the potato topping looked awfully dry, at which point we decided to add a whole lot more butter.

 

The end result was perfectly OK – fusion you might say, but I wouldn’t.