Latest on the Sake

We are at the three week mark now. The instructions said I could strain it out at two weeks and start drinking it. The instructions also said that if you let it sit for two or three more weeks it will get more refined.

The fermentation has slowed down. There are not as many bubbles of gas coming out of the airlock as there were before. While the darkened glass of the growler hides things, the color of the sake changes from bottom to top. The bottom is much lighter colored, almost as if the rice became a kind of white mush. As you go up the rice is loose and floating in a cloudy liquid. Closer to the top the liquid seems clearer.

I took a taste of the stuff. There is definitely alcohol in there. But the flavor leaves a bit to be desired. It is a bit sour. The rice is very soft. At this point, it is anything but refined.

Haggis Follow - Up

Since last Sunday I've made a couple new dishes with the leftover haggis.

- Haggis shepherd's pie.
- Haggis on white rice with a light dash of soy sauce.

This really is an underrated and very flexible food. Reminiscent of spam.

I still have a 5 X 2 inch block of this stuff in the fridge. Maybe I'll wrap it up in puff pastry and make a Haggis Wellington.

A Kinsmen

After making the Haggis I feel a kind of kinship with Toddish MacWong, the man behind the events below.

http://www.gunghaggisfatchoy.com/

Making the Haggis

This whole thing turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. I'm not done yet either -- I still got a stash of haggis meat in my freezer waiting to be stuffed.

I did some research online, found a website with multiple haggis recipes.

http://www.smart.net/~tak/haggis.html

The recipe I went with was a mix of those recipes, but with a few alterations.

1 sheeps stomach
1 lb of liver
A sheeps kidney
A sheeps heart
1 lb of steel cut Irish oats
1 lb of fatback (salt pork)
1/2 tsp each of cayenne pepper, and allspice

The original recipes called for suet instead of fatback. I couldn't find suet at the local markets. But I could get fatback at Cala market. I guess people in SF like pork fat more than beef/lamb fat.

I got the sheeps belly from this place in the Tenderloin.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/queen-of-sheba-san-francisco

The lady who runs the place didn't seem to believe I was serious when I special ordered a sheeps belly. She was two days late -- but she delivered.

The stomach itself though was not in good condition. It was split down the middle. The instructions said to boil it for 1.5 hours to clean out any impurities. The boiling was definitely necessary --- the stomach was filthy with residue from the grass the sheep ate. But the boiling weakened the lining that held the stomach together. I could have stuffed 4 lbs of organ meats and oats into it, but it would have been impossible to seal it well enough to handle a pot of boiling water.

From Storehouse

Reminds me of the the Alien movies.

I had to find a solution. Rummaging through the web, I found that using sheeps stomach is a really old school way of making haggis. Most haggis' these days are made using a kind of sausage casing called Beef Caps. Also, reading the updated recipes, it became apparent that the stomach (the thing that weirds out so many people) doesn't really impart any kind of flavor or texture to the haggis. Its just a cooking vessel -- albeit a gross one.

Solution -- cheese cloth and red leaf lettuce. I split the meat into two portions. I laid out the red leaf lettuce onto a sheet of cheese cloth, laid the haggis stuffing onto the lettuce, and rolled it up into a tootsie roll. This one I put into a boiling pot of water. The other portion I wrapped up with cheese cloth into a big Hershey's chocolate kiss looking thing and plopped it into a steamer.

From Storehouse

From Storehouse

After two hours of cooking, the steamed candy kiss haggis wasn't that ugly. It was the one we ended up eating.

From Storehouse

From Storehouse

The tootsie roll haggis was another story. Peeling off the cheese cloth, then the overcooked redleaf lettuce, I felt like an Egyptologist peeling the wraps off a mummy.

From Storehouse

Looks are deceiving though. How it tastes is what matters.

I thought the haggis' might come out OK, but wasn't sure. M was skeptical of it at first, but when she tried it, it reminded her of a breakfast hash type of thing she used to eat at a deli/cafeteria nearby one of her old jobs. She even suggested serving it on top of rice, a kind of Scottish-Japanese fusion food. I thought it was a tad salty, but liked it more with every bite. By the time we put away the plates most of the candy kiss haggis was gone.

Looking back on it, I can understand now those stories I've heard about Scottish people getting angry and upset at having their haggis (or is it haggi?) impounded at the border by Customs. On a cold wet evening (like we had tonight) haggis & mashed potatoes are comfort food. I can very easily see taking the leftover haggis meat and using it in a shepherds pie, or putting it into a rice ball wrapped in nori.

I leave with the following;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kzYaIphbzU

ODE TO A HAGGIS

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my arm

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
You pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’need
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead

His knife see Rustic-labour dight,
An’ cut you up wi’ ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reeking, rich!

Then, horn for horn they stretch an’ strive,
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive
Bethankit hums

Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither’d rash
His spindle-shank a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro’ bluidy flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ legs, an’ arms an’ heads will sned,
Like taps o’ thrissle

Ye pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,
An’ dish them out their bill o’fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ pray’r,

Gie her a Haggis!

Scotland Forever.

I had joked about this at various times during the past 4 years. When my buddy J made scottish ales at home, we'd talk about this. It would come up in discussions with third parties.

Well this weekend, I'm doing the trial run.

I'M MAKING A HAGGIS!!

Not So F@#@-ing Krav Maga

At the recommendation of the instructor who witnessed my knuckle shredding, I took a couple of the other conditioning classes.

Earlier in the week I took the Conditioning class, today I took TRX, the suspension strap class.

Conditioning -- a very hard cardio workout. The instructor was definitely one of the tougher trainers in the school. I haven't done so many burpees and squats in a very long time. My butt and hamstrings have gotten progressively more sore since that evening's class. Sitting down and getting up from my office chair is a chore. She also had us a do a deceptively rough exercise that was a forward lunge with a medicine ball held straight above our heads -- a lat killer.

TRX -- not that hard on the upper body, but a middle section where we suspended our feet a foot off the ground while in a plank position broke the class. The instructor had us do a series of moves -- bringing the knees straight towards the chest, to the sides, both legs up the sides at the same time like a frog, etc. Doesn't sound like much, and it didn't seem like much. It was then that I, and so many others in class, found out how weak our core muscles are. There were a lot of people (myself included) who had to break position, sweating and huffing in frustration and pain.

I got a bad feeling that everytime I laugh over the next few days I'll feel sharp needles of pain all over my gut.

So thus far my knuckles, butt, hamstrings, knees, and stomach, are shot.

Still got to take the Crossfit class. Going by whats happened thus far, sometime in the middle of the week, I'll be complaining about my shoulders, arms, and back, getting chewed up.

Triathlons are EASY compared to this sh#@.

F$#$-ing Krav Maga

I chewed up my knuckles on Saturday real bad.  Red, sore, bloody.

Since its winter now, running, open water swimming, and biking, isn't really feasible.  I also really needed a change.  So I decided to sign up at a local Krav Maga school, try it out for a month, see how it goes.

The school offers both regular Krav workouts as well as supplemental workouts that do other things, like work your upper body.  The workouts are also cardio intensive.  All these workouts seem to spill back into Krav.  For example, the high intensity cardio gives you the endurance to handle sparring.  So I took a class that was a 1 hour non-stop punching & kicking workout against a heavy punching bag.

The bag class came after the intro to Krav class.  The intro Krav class is a pretty good workout by itself.  At that point I probably should have gone home.  But I wanted to get my $$ worth -- its an expensive school.  But me, being overly fixated on getting my $$ worth, I did the bag class afterwards as well.

The school requires students to get either bag gloves, regular boxing gloves, or knuckle wraps, to do the bag class.  I had used regular boxing gloves before -- very heavy, punching with them feels a little like punching with lightweight dumbbells after a while.  So I decided to get the bag gloves -- much lighter.

Throughout the bag class I was worried about over-exerting myself.  The bag class and the intro to Krav were essentially 2 hours of cardio & upper body workouts.  I hadn't done anything like this since mid-autumn during the tale end of the triathlon/cycling season.  Naturally, I got really winded.  This was more intense than my usual cardio workouts -- a lot more like an extended interval session.  

The instructor, bad ass kick boxer, was actually very understanding of my situation, and advised me to step to the side if I started feeling lightheaded.  He also noticed I was getting disoriented. I began having problems adding moves to the punch/kick combinations he was asking us to do.  So he was cool with me slowing down, even encouraging me to slow down and just work on my form. 

Around 40 minutes into the workout, the instructor told us to grab some water, take our gloves off, rest for 2 minutes.  I took my gloves off, and then noticed that;

- My hands were shaking;

- My knuckles were raw and red.  My knuckles looked like someone ran a cheese grater across them for several minutes.

Oddly enough, my knuckles didn't actually hurt.  My shoulders & lungs felt much worse than my knuckles.  I had sweat so much that my glasses were completely fogged up.

When the instructor called us back to the mat, I put my gloves back on and went back to work on my bag.  In retrospect, being really tired, I wasn't really thinking straight.

After the workout finally ended, I showed my knuckles to the instructor, and asked him if I was doing something wrong.  His shtick -- if you were punching wrong, all the blood and scraping would be at one area of your knuckles.  In my case the damage stretched across my knuckles, which meant there was an issue with my gloves.  His recommendation -- don't do his bag class, or even the Krav classses, till my knuckles fully healed.  He recommended I do something less rough on my knuckles like TRX or Crossfit.

TRX?  Crossfit?  That's Commando/SWAT team shit!

After the instructor told me to take another class for awhile, one of my more experienced classmates added, "Yeah, that way the rest of your body can feel as bad as your knuckles.  Huh, huh."

Wise ass!  

  

My knuckles are shot for the next few days, but I'm going back to the bag class as soon as I can.   A little bit of blood is a small price for a good workout.