I unfortunately have only visited Scotland once. One of my uncles through marriage was a Scottish Canadian born in Canada. 4 of his older brothers were born in Inch.
I also wore a Hunting Stewart tartan kilt as part of my school uniform for 9 years. I feel part Scottish.
There are Burn’s Night Dinners at some restaurants, pubs, and Scottish social clubs across Canada. The tickets for the Burns Night Dinner at the Caledonian pub in Toronto sell out weeks in advance.
This picture does not quite do it justice, but here we have my riff on cullen skink, which employs smoked oysters (someone gave me a tin recently), tempered (not entirely successfully) sour cream, milk, vegetable stock, onion and potato. Also some fresh thyme that I need to use up before it’s not so fresh. Very nice!
Very nice indeed. When I made cullen skink for Burn’s Night I knew I wouldn’t be able to find smoked haddock so I bought a tin of smoked oysters and a tin of smoked trout. The oysters were way too smoky for me so I used the trout. It was really good, I need to make it again if I can still find smoked trout.
That looks and sounds wonderful.
I did the smoked trout thing in December!
One of these days maybe I’ll even make it “right”!
It was very nice! If you avert your eyes from the broken sour cream.
Broken, shmoken. Sour cream’s good eats.
I will make Salmon with a Whisky cream tonight
Breakfast for dinner! I decided to try making vegan black pudding. There are a lot of recipes out there, and none of them look like they work particularly well. As if this is a job best left to manufacturers and not home cooks. Spoiler alert: it seems to be.
I decided the BBC might be trustworthy-ish, so I went with this method. I made a few changes - subbed miso paste (which I had) for nutritional yeast (which I did not) and black lentils for black beans (see above), and I added 50g of beet, something I’d seen in other recipes that looked like a way to give it a little bloodness.
The process took forever and was a huge pain in the ass, some of which was the process and some of which was me shooting myself in the foot (sure, burn a batch of lentils for the first time in your damn life). The recipe called for the cooked mush to be prepared au torchon, which I have done successfully in the past with monkfish liver and did not do successfully tonight. The mush remained mush even after an hour of steaming. So in an effort to make it semi-presentable, I fried it in my egg ring.
It tasted alright, but the texture was less vegan black pudding and more Moosewood party dip.
I can continue to experiment with it, because goddess help me, I have a lot left over. Egg and potato and bialy, thankfully, delivered.
My tentative plan is to make mince, tatties, and green cabbage because that’s what I have on hand.
Needs a square sausage 
I hope you can see this.
This was my only encounter with it.
At the diner next to the bus station in Inverness. Home of the oldest jukebox in Scotland!
But I can make it square, sure.
Not a reserved man, is he? 
I wonder what the soda adds. Other than ad revenue.
I am seeing 2 main types of Scottish lamb stew online.
One type topped with dumplings, like this one
a Canadian living in Shetland
Hairst Bree/ Harvest Broth / Hotch Potch with spring vegetables like nettle tops and asparagus, like these
Hotch Potch is related etymologically to Maritimer Hodge Podge/ Hodgepodge but Hodge Podge in the Maritimes tends to be a vegetable and dairy harvest dish, that does not contain meat. The Maritime version is a vegetable chowder.
The Scottish Hotch Potch/ Scottish Hodge Podge tends to call for lamb and veg, and I’m not seeing many Scottish Hotch Potch recipes calling for dairy.
…..
beef stew
Some of The Hebridean Baker’s online recipes
I have a feeling that as the only scot on the board, my references are just evaporating. Ah well. Looks like a nice brekkie regardless.
Did you refer to something?
