We moved to South East London a few weeks ago, and last weekend finally made it down to Brockley Market.

It’s only been going for a few months, but the organisers have pulled together a really nice selection of stalls including organic fruit, veg, meat, as well as a few street food style vendors and some great coffee. Special mention should go out to Mike & Ollie for their delicious mackerel wrap, and the Mother Flipper burger I sampled. Brunch of champions.

In general I have a bit of a problem with the prices of farmers markets in and around London, particularly when it comes to meat, so I decided to set myself a challenge. Spend a tenner or less to put together some decent grub. After spying a nice slab of chuck steak at Jacob’s ladder, I hit on the idea of making pasties. I cheated a bit as the flour and butter I already had at home, but including the cost of store cupboard ingredients I probably still only spent £8 or £9, which is pretty decent for 4 chunky pasties.

Ingredients

For the filling

450g chuck steak

1 medium carrot

1 medium potato

1 small swede

1 medium onion

Olive oil

A few sprigs of fresh thyme

White pepper

Salt

For the pastry

500g strong bread flour

250 butter (or you could go half and half with lard if you have it)

5g salt

Approx. 100ml cold water

Egg wash to finish

Method

You want to make your pastry at least an hour before you’re going to get busy constructing your pasties, so sift your flour and salt into your food processor, cube up your butter (making sure its cold), add to the flour, and pulse in a blender until you have a breadcrumby consistency (you can obviously also do this by hand or with a mixer). Add your cold water and continue to process until your dough forms a ball. Pat together any scraps, then wrap it clingfilm to rest in the fridge.

Whilst the dough is resting, prep the veg. Peel the potato, swede and carrot and slice them up. In general you want all the pieces to be roughly the same size which is a couple of millimeters thick and about the size of an old postage stamp. Then chop up your onion relatively finely, and put everything in a large bowl. Tear the leaves off your sprigs of thyme (really as much as you fancy), and then add salt and a very generous quantity of white pepper. Again this depends on taste, but the pasties I know and love from Cornwall have a good peppery punch, so I recon around 7 or 8 grams for this quantity. Add a good glug of olive oil, and then get your hands in there and give everything a good mix around. Give the veg a taste, and then either adjust the seasoning, or set aside.

Now to the meat. Take your chuck, and cut it into dice sized cubes, trimming off anything that looks or feels a bit sinewy, and then place in a separate bowl and give the meat a little sprinkle with salt.

After the pastry has had a chance to relax, take it out of the fridge and divide into four equal quantities. Flour your work surface, and then carefully roll each piece out, as round as you can, until it’s about 25cm wide by 3-4mm thick. You can trim the edges using something like a side plate if you want neater results.

Next place a good quantity of the veg mix on one half of your pastry, and then top this with some of the meat. You roughly want two or three times as much veg as you have meat. Then using a brush (or your fingers) moisten the circumference of the pastry with egg wash. This is going to help seal the edges when you get to the next stage; crimping. I’m not going to lie to you, my crimping needs a whole lot of work, but using your fingers, a fork or however you roll, seal the edge of your pasty as neatly as you can.

Finally give each one a good egg washing all over and pierce with a knife so the steam can escape, before popping in a preheated oven to bake at 190c for 50 minutes until they are lovely and golden brown. And that’s it. You’re ready to eat…well almost. A small word of warning. The insides of these fellas are going to be as hot as Hades, so let them cool off for a few minutes before you get stuck in.

A big haggis = lots of leftovers, but what do you do with them?As we had ours with ‘neeps’, ‘tatties’, and cabbage we had all the makings of a bubble and squeak, and I thought I’d add some haggis into the mix and see what happened. Turns out it was a pretty good idea. Made into patties and fried in a little oil, they made a great dinner, but reckon they’d make a good breakfast too.

Ingredients

400g cooked haggis

150g cooked cabbage, shredded

150g potato, smashed

150g swede, smashed

1 onion

Salt and pepper

Eggs (optional)

Method

So this is pretty much as far from rocket science as you can get.

First up, chop and fry the onion until it’s nice and soft and caramalised. When done, add it to a bowl with the rest of the ingredients. In an ideal world your potato and swede is just smashed, as opposed to mashed with milk, butter etc, but if it is, don’t worry too much, and your cabbage should be shredded.

Combine everything together until you’ve got a nice even mix, add a pinch of salt and lots of black pepper, and then mix again.

Next make all the mix into patties. You’re looking to get them around 10cm wide and 2cm thick. I use a pastry / cooks ring to make things easier, there should be enough mix to make around 6.

Because of the haggis they’re going to be pretty sticky, so once you’ve made them, coat with flour, then move from hand to hand to dust of any excess. Now fry them two at a time in a little oil in a hot pan. They’re ready when the outside of the patty is a dark golden brown and slightly crusty.

Serve with a fried egg on top, a crisp salad and loads of Tabasco.

Burns night lives on.

The 25th of January means that it’s Burns Night chez Hand To Mouth. Despite my name I’m not Scottish, and neither of us are huge poetry fans, but we both love a bit of haggis so we celebrate Scotland’s favourite son with a bit of haggis and a drop or two of whiskey.

People get a bit squeamish about haggis as it’s made with sheep offal (lungs, liver and heart) and (traditionally) cooked in a sheep’s stomach. These days most haggises are sold in artificial casings, and there’s really nothing to worry about as all the contents are mashed up and mixed with onion, oatmeal, beef fat, spices and salt.

When it’s liberated from the casing the haggis it warm, sticky, hearty and really tasty. We have ours with neeps (mashed swede – still no idea why it’s called neeps), greens, and and intense onion and whiskey gravy.

Tradition dictates that you welcome the haggis to your table with one of Burn’s most famous poems ‘Address To A Haggis’. It’s pretty tricky to read, but it’s a bit of fun.

Ingredients

Serves 2

1 small haggis

1 medium swede

1/2 a large onion

300 ml chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon marmite

1 heaped teaspoon plain flour

25 ml whiskey

150g spring greens

Butter

Olive oil

Sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Method

First up, release the haggis from it’s plastic casing then wrap up in tin foil. Put a pan of water on the heat, and when it’s up to boiling point, pop in the armour clad haggis and cover with a lid. You’re going to simmer it for around 45 minutes.

Next prepare the gravy. Chop and slice half an onion, and then brown in a pan with a little olive oil and butter. When the onions are nice and soft, add marmite. Next add the flour and stir in to the onions, forming a paste. Cook this off for a minute or so before adding the whiskey. Burn off the alcohol, and then add the stock, season with a good few grinds of black pepper, and simmer until the liquid has reduced by about a third.

When the haggis is about 25 minutes from being ready, peel and chop your swede and add to boiling water. Cook the swede for around 20 minutes, then drain and mash with some butter, salt and pepper. Whilst you’re doing this boil up the spring greens for about 3-4 minutes until tender, and then drain and also season with butter, salt and pepper.

Next remove the haggis from the water, take off the foil and then slice the casing open with a sharp knife. A word of warning, the contents of the haggis expand during cooking, so they can spill out pretty fast when you make you’re incision. Scrape out the good stuff, discard the skin and serve with the neeps, greens and a generous helping of the onion gravy.

Eat with a little dram of your favourite whiskey, and toast Robbie Burns.