Burns night(ish)

Every year I try to invite a few friends round on the Saturday nearest to Burns Night and feed them a meal which includes haggis in some form. I know it really ought to be just haggis, neeps and tatties but I quite like to experiment! This year I made a haggis roulade based on the idea here

I used a slightly spicy sausage from Waitrose instead of the Toulouse sausage and I think it worked pretty well (it all got eaten so that’s a good sign!) I served it with roast potatoes, tender stem  broccoli (cooked using Heston Blumenthal’s “At home” recipe and then mashed carrots, turnips and potatoes to add a traditional touch.

As a starter I decided to go a bit retro with a prawn cocktail but used rocket and watercress as a base with smoked salmon, prawns and a dollop of caviar. I used a spicy salad dressing instead of Marie-Rose sauce and garnished with a slice of lemon. I think the combination worked well.

Dessert was fairly simple. I decided to do a chocolate pot because I’d seen one served on “Come dine with me” a few days earlier. I put some mandarin segments in a ramekin and topped it with chocolate mousse (200g good dark chocolate, eggs, cream and a bit of cointreau just for flavour). That looked a bit uninspiring so I made a white chocolate ganache and put that on top and added another mandarin segment just to make it look nice (and it tasted pretty good as well!)

My first 4 guests actually arrived for breakfast on Saturday so they got home made bread buns served with sausage patties (bit of a cheat; I just skinned ordinary sausages and reshaped them) and scrambled egg (use an electric whisk to make it fluffy)

I went to Dallas last year and for brunch one morning we had a pulled pork sandwich. I rather liked that and have been thinking of how I could serve it for breakfast. My guests stayed for Sunday breakfast and that gave me a chance. I took some stewing pork and put it in the slow cooker with a good dollop of barbecue sauce. I then put it on slow and left it for about 8 hours. The result is very soft pork which is easy to pull apart with forks. To serve it I took some large mushrooms, cooked them and topped with the pulled pork. A large slice of tomato went on top of that and finally a slice of halloumi cheese just to make sure there were enough calories!

The only disaster was that I forgot to take photos of the food but I was pretty pleased other than that!