Haggis craft for Burns’ Night

DH and I took The Girls to the supermarket this weekend, which is something we rarely do. Remarkably, things went smoothly. Even more remarkably, the staff gave DH a voucher as a ‘goodwill gesture’ from the management: the man in front of us was short of money and DH very kindly made up the difference. If this is an example of the level of service you get in a Waitrose then I shall spend more time in there: at the very least I want to try out the new cafe with our unexpected voucher.

Aside from DH’s random act of kindness, and Waitrose’s reciprocation, the trip had one significant moment that stuck in the minds of The Girls: there was a funny object that they hadn’t seen before in the meat aisle: what was it. I explained that it was a kind of sausage (in our house meat comes in two variations: a kind-of-sausage or a sort-of-chicken) that Scottish people eat on Burn’s Night.

Which is, somehow, how I found myself in the kitchen today ‘making Haggis’. Now I’m fairly sure that there is a description of a Haggis which goes along the lines of ‘you take a sheep’s stomach and you stuff it with meat and barley’. Frankly, I balked at sheep’s stomach, so the contents make not a jot of difference to me. But I used my mummy-initiative, found two old toothbrushes and showed LBG and Dimples how to flick paint.

 

And flick they did: red and yellow and brown and black got splattered all over the paper, the floor (I laid out a large mess mat which caught the worst of it), the dog and themselves. Then we left the art to dry whilst we paid a visit to Granny M. Later, I cut a slightly cartoonish Haggis shape from the speckled paper and each child stuck it firmly down onto a piece of paper. They stood proudly before the ‘funny sausage’ once they were displayed in the kitchen and declared themselves to be proud of their work, but that they “don’t think I would like to eat it, Mamma”. I entirely agree.