Our next supper club, Burn’s Night by candlelight, is this weekend and I’ve been busy preparing for that. The supper clubs are great fun as I get to go a lot further with the local ingredients that we use.

Our first few this year focussed on our Tamworth pigs, and one of the highlights for me was the confit smoked pork belly that we smoked ourselves. It was truly delicious!
The menu for Burn’s Night is as follows:
Canapés
Braised venison tartlet with a potato crumb
East Neuk Kiln House smoked salmon roulade on a sourdough crostini
Cumbrae oyster with a yuzu mignonette and dill oil
Starter
Roast beetroot and pickled apple whipped crowdie with candied walnuts, chicory and a lemon vinaigrette
Main
Haggis, neeps and tatties with a Drambuie cream sauce and pickled neeps
Pudding
Tipsy Laird Scottish trifle followed by Scottish cheeses and whisky
I’m making the haggis fresh, which is quite a procedure, and everyone knows not to come into the kitchen for the day! It’s not the freshest of smells, but the flavour when it’s done is so much better than anything off the shelf. Making haggis (other than catching one in the wild, of course) requires a lot of cleaning of lamb hearts, lungs and liver. You want to get rid of the arteries in the heart, for example. You then boil them twice with two sets of water, which usually takes two or three hours, and it's then a case of adding lots of spices, from cracked black pepper to nutmeg, via cayenne pepper, paprika and allspice.

You then leave it all overnight in the stock that it's been cooked in before reducing it down the next day. With all the spices added, you then put in diced onions, pin-head oatmeal and cook it all off for a couple of hours. Every 20 minutes you need to stir it as otherwise you get very overcooked bits on the outside. You then leave it overnight (again!) to let all the flavours settle. As I said, it's quite a procedure...
The lamb we're using is coming from our butcher David Henderson and from Balgove, while the neeps and tatties are also local.
Everything will be coming from Fife, even the smoked salmon for the roulade crostini, which is from the East Neuk Kiln House. The venison for the tartlet is from the farm here, and the oysters (below) are from David Lowrie, my long-standing fish merchant from the East Neuk. The roasted beetroot and pickled apple whipped crowdie will star our own beetroot from the garden here – it has a wonderfully earthy taste to it.

The berries for the Tipsy Laird are also our own, which we cooked down in the late summer. It’s always great having fresh berries, but I do think the taste of them, once cooked, is so much richer.
Turning attention to the café, the specials this week are:
Roast pork loin with potato fondant, purple sprouting broccoli, braised red cabbage and an apple cider sauce – £17.95
Sweet potato rosti with wilted spinach, poached eggs and an applewood-smoked hollandaise – £12.95
The pork loin is from our Tamworths (they really are the gift that keeps on giving!) and it’s been something I’ve wanted to have as a special for a while. If we didn’t butcher the pigs into larger joints, and created more bacon and sausages, they wouldn’t have lasted very long in the café. However, the larger joints have meant that we can really show off how good they are via the supper clubs and specials.
The sweet potato rosti is a breakfast item and comes with our farm poached eggs and wilted spinach. I’m making a smoked Hollandaise to go with that so the butter itself will be put in our smoker, and I’ll use apple wood chips to give it a hint of apple.
We’re very lucky to be based in Fife as it really is one of the greatest food larders anywhere. I’ll hopefully see you over the weekend, whether that’s in the café or at the supper club, so that you can try some of the things leaving the kitchen door this week!
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