Vegan Haggis

With Burns' Night coming up next week, I'm listing some of my favourite vegan-friendly Scottish dishes.

Today I turn my attention to haggis. Traditionally, haggis contains the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, (along with oatmeal and some other ingredients) and is cooked in the animal's stomach for 3 hours! Now, you'd need a pretty strong stomach yourself to eat that, but some people like it. Nowadays, a lot of folk (including non-veggies) prefer a vegetarian option.

This is the best veggie Haggis recipe I've found. A lot of commercial vegetarian haggis contains peanuts, which I prefer not to use, so I crack open some walnuts to make this.

If you want to leave the nuts out altogether, you can substitute sunflower seeds or cooked (& drained) rice.

Ingredients
2 oz (50g) margarine
2oz (50g) rolled oats
2oz (50g) pinhead oatmeal
2oz (50g) mixed chopped walnuts (or any other nuts of choice)
1 large carrot
4oz (100g)mushrooms
1 large onion
small can kidney beans (drained)
2 oz vegetarian suet
1/2 teaspoon yeast extract
1 tablespoon (or more!) whisky
1 teaspoon (at least) freshly ground black pepper
juice of 1 lime
3 teaspoons of dried herbs

Method

Melt 1oz margarine in an ovenproof saucepan / casserole.

Add oats, oatmeal and nuts and cook for 3 minutes. Put aside.

Chop the carrot, mushrooms and onion finely and fry in 1oz margarine, along with the kidney beans for approx 2-3 minutes

Stir in the rest of the ingredients and the oats and nuts.

Mix it all up and cook for a further 5 minutes.

Transfer the mixture into a loaf tin or shape into a fat sausage shape on a baking tray.

Cook in the oven at 390ºF (200ºC) for 40 minutes.

Serve with Neeps and Tatties and a generous dram!

"Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,

Great chieftain o' the puddin'-race!"