Enshroomed

So I had the idea for the title of this meal long before I acually had any idea what to put in it, except for the eponymous mushrooms of course. It was between 'Enshroomed' and 'To imbibe, cook straight and lose a tooth', and the latter is perhaps a little too specific to me alone.

I figured I could pull my usual trick of loading it up with beef, spices and cheese, but then I figured why not make it a bit interesting and use... oh, I don't know, sheep lungs, beef heart, and various other grisly ingredients? Or as most, less morbidly inclined, people call it, Haggis.

So with that idea fully formed in my mind, all I had to do was get the time to actually make the fucking thing. I had originally planned to just use 1 or 2 giant portobello mushrooms, but by the time I eventually got off work and got to the only supermarket open at that time, they had somehow sold out of giant fuckin' mushrooms, DAMNIT! So this recipe was made under extremely compromised conditions, and I apologize for that, it should have been so much better.

My plans for the other ingredients were pretty rough, except that I wanted it to look like a delicious death metal album cover when I was done. So I picked up some good strong red cheddar, some ground peri peri spices, a bottle of Louisiana hotsauce, and for some reason I decided that red food colouring would be a good idea. It wasn't.

So, to start this off, you have to choose your weapon of choice when it comes to cooking your haggis. You basically have 3 options:

• The quick option, 5 minutes in a bowl in the microwave.
• The medium, and probably optimal option, boiling it on the stove in the skin for around 45 minutes.
• The sloooooow tedious option, 90 minutes (!) in the oven, on Gas Mark 5, or whatever the equivalents are.

I went for the slow, doomy option, as always. I needed time to shower as I hadn't felt human in days and I had started to suspect there was a small eco-system living in my hair. Also, it gives you time to throw on some music while you prepare all your other ingredients. Obviously, you should go for Entombed while making this meal, but any death metal will suffice. Wrap your haggis, still in it's skin, in a good amount of tin foil, and stick it on a baking tray with a slight covering of water in it, and shove it into the fire.

So while you're torturing your mushrooms with a big fuckin' knife, removing their stalks and all that... whatever they call that weird-black-shit-inside-mushrooms, your haggis should maybe be around the 80 minute mark.
Pop the disembowled mushrooms on a baking tray, and don't be an idiot and forget you hate oil and accidentally add some like I did. urrrgh. Put those in your oven besides the haggis for around 5-10 minutes.
While those are hopefully sweating out all that gross mushroom-y liquid, take this time to grate up a pretty good amount of cheese, and to gut some red chillies. Don't, whatever you do, decide to make it look good by splashing red food colouring all over your plate like blood spatter patterns, as that stuff tastes NASTY!

Always put taste over presentation, but if you can have some fun with it without sacrificing taste, go for it!

Remove both the mushroom tray and the haggis tray from your oven, and switch on your grill immediately. Your mushrooms should hopefully have 'baked' so they're nice, crispy and dried out. This wasn't the case with mine, but I blame the fact they were just shitty normal-sized mushrooms, not ones of the magnitude that they have an atomic blast named after 'em.
Slit open the skin of the haggis, and dig around inside until you've turned that fucker inside out, scraping out every last disgusting morsel. Cram in as much of the haggis as you can into your mushroom(s), really pack it in.
Finally sprinkle on some of that strong-ass cheddar, splash in some hotsauce, and impale your chilli peppers on toothpicks, then stab 'em all the way into the mushroom, so it looks like some kind of delicious weird voodoo doll. Stick this under the grill for 3-4 minutes, just enough to char your cocktail sticks and melt your cheese.

Finally, serve with a glass of milk, coz this stuff is SERIOUSLY spicey!