The turnips are the wrong colour! Burns Night - Part 2

The traditional accompaniments to a Haggis are turnips and mash. That, along with the varied tastes, gives a pleasing look to the plate - the dark meat, the white potatoes and the orangey turnips. Only one problem then, in Spain the turnips are white. They taste the same but look like this:

Traditionally, we use these:

So, we needed to add something to give is the colour with out changing the taste too much. Someone suggested I add yams and so on Saturday I came back from the market in Aguilas with bags of white turnips and yams.

I cooked the yams and turnips seperately and then added them together before mashing. They soon mingled to make the correct colour and taste wise? well, surprisingly good. The only other problem I had is that white turnip is a very wet vegetable so after mashing and draining the juices that settled out, the full pan I started with was now only half a pan of mashed turnip - hopefully it would be enough.

Barbara & Lucy had offered to do the potatoes and would be bringing them later. Neil was doing an onion gravy and so we were all under control. So much so that when we had a call from some friends in the afternoon to say their Setanta wasn't working and they wanted to see the Rangers v Aberdeen fixture we told them to come round.

As we had decided to do a traditional Haggis supper and so we needed a traditional pudding for afterwards. There is only one thing that would do - we needed, without any doubt, a traditional Clouty Dumpling.

Now I have never made one and I don't think I've had dumpling since my mid-teens. My Scottish Grandpa used to make them. A Clouty is a steamed pudding done in muslin cloth and is a heavy fruit suet pudding - and it's great. If there was anything to bring back childhood memories for me - it's a Clouty! Our friend Sue was up for the challenge and got a traditional recipe, and a top tip from a relative - instead of muslin cloth used a cotton pillowcase - and so Sue made her first (and maybe only) Clouty.


And what a success it turned out to be - all the right flavours, the taste was spot on and it looked great! Well done Sue!

We had 15 people coming to supper so the furniture needed a bit of re-arranging, we had a CD of scottish music, we had bagpipe music to pipe in the Haggis, my Toast speech was written, the shortbread was on it's way and Neil had sorted all the Whisky out - time to get showered and changed and await the arrival of the guests.