To celebrate Burns Night Mary Griffin rose to the challenge of creating a homemade haggis - the ultimate in thrift food.

Each year on St Patrick’s Day I suddenly rediscover my Irish roots.

And a similar thing happens on Burns Night when the chance to don a touch of tartan, eat a meaty feast and glug whisky is just too good to pass up.

So, with economic doom and gloom hanging all around, I took up the challenge of becoming a have-a-go haggis maker.

Haggis is the ultimate thrift meal.

It’s a sad fact that lungs, hearts and digestive tracts are now more likely to be found in a dog bowl than on the dinner table, but this fodder is bursting with nutrients, is cheaper than chips and could even boost your sex life (with the staff at Leeds Market’s Tripe Shop claiming good quality tripe can increase your libido by up to four times).

So, launching Project Haggis – my mission to turn a dog’s dinner into a delicacy – the first step is to source my ingredients.

Calling several local butchers I soon realised shopping for a sheep’s stomach would be a tad more tricky than I had hoped.

Luckily local carnivores are blessed with one of only a handful of abattoirs in the country that is fronted by a butcher’s shop, selling myriad freshly slaughtered meat.

CH Rowley’s in Old Arley, just east of Coleshill, has been supplying locally-reared meat for nearly 100 years. And it doesn’t get fresher than this.

The cuts on the counter come from animals grazed within a 10-mile radius and slaughtered on site a matter of hours ago.

When he heard about my mission – and after he’d stopped laughing – Simon Rowley (whose grandfather founded the enterprise) was confident he could deliver the goods.

He told me abattoir staff were set to slaughter sheep the next day and invited us over in the afternoon to reap the harvest.

The slaughterhouse smell of fresh blood awoke my inner carnivore and the freshly cut ‘pluck’ (the innards of the sheep) looked as tempting as any steak, with the rich scarlet of the heart, next to the bright pink lungs and the velvety purple liver.

But just as I was working up an appetite, I had my first encounter with a sheep’s stomach.

Having done my research I had seen pictures of “ox bungs” (intestines) which are regularly used as an alternative haggis casing. They’re large, bright white and look like a giant condom.

But the thing Simon pulled from a bucket of brine looked more like the stuff of nightmares and I was automatically holding my nose to shield myself from the stench.

Putting on a brave face, I bagged up the stomach, intending to forget about it for as long as I could, and headed home from the butchers with around £2.50-worth of meat.

Having collected a number of haggis recipes the one instruction that sent a shiver down my spine was that the cook should trail the windpipe over the side of the pan into a bowl “to drain away any impurities”.

I stuck to the rules and followed the instructions, but soon wished I hadn’t. The windpipe stuck to the side of the hot pot, melting into a bright pink gooey candyfloss.

So I pulled out the lungs (or “lights” as butchers call them) and cut away the windpipe before returning the lungs to the pan to carry on cooking.

While the heart and liver sank to the bottom of the boiling water, the lungs bobbed on the surface like floats in a swimming pool. After an hour, when the vibrant reds and pinks of the meat had turned to deep browns and dark lilacy-greys, I fished out each piece from the pot, leaving them in a bowl to cool.

I cut them into chunks, blitzed the lot in a food processor to make my offal mince and then blended this with two finely chopped onions, 200g oatmeal, 200g suet (animal fat) and some generous handfuls of herbs, spices, salt and pepper.

Using the offal cooking water as stock, I poured over a few cups – enough to moisten the mixture and bind it together. At this point, I had ignored the sheep’s stomach as long as I possibly could. I untied the bag, holding my breath, and tentatively lifted out the nightmare lurking inside.

Unlike the smooth-looking white ox bung I had seen in pictures, the outer lining of the sheep’s stomach was a muddy yellowy-brown and rough, like wrinkled, potted, leathery skin.

The inside was soft, moist and white, speckled with green where evidence of the sheep’s last grassy supper could still be seen.

I began to pull the inner lining from the exterior, freeing a stretchy white film from the bumpy leathery bag.

Let me be frank: this was not a happy task.

While handling the stomach I found myself, alone in my kitchen, screaming out obscenities – half directed at the mess of matter in my hands, half directed at myself for having got into such a ridiculous pickle when I could have been sitting on the sofa, sipping wine and laughing at bad TV.

So at this stage, like any good project manager, I began plotting an alternative route. The stomach was an irregular shape with a thick, lumpy, bumpy seam running down its middle so even if I managed to separate the membrane without tearing it, I’d still struggle to turn it into the food bag I needed.

Delighted to accept defeat, I bagged the sheep’s stomach (which at this stage looked like something from Ridley Scott’s Alien), double-bagged it – fearing it might find a way to crawl out and strangle me in the night – and binned it.

Stuck with enough haggis stuffing to feed a small army but with nothing to stuff it in, I was rescued by synthetic casings.

These plastic pockets – donated by a sympathetic bucher – look like a thick flat ruler, and when you soak them in warm water you can open them up and stretch them into a bag shape.

I had used the pluck of just one sheep but it went far enough to fill five haggis bags. Packed tightly and tied up with string, my haggises looked like a row of perfectly wrapped parcels.

I pricked them with a needle to stop them exploding in the boiling water, and dropped them into a hot pot.

The meat is already cooked, so this second boiling is simply to bind the ingredients together.

After an hour-and-a-half my haggises were ready to eat, but with a couple of hours to kill before dinner time, I left them to cool and froze the rest while putting one in the oven later to re-heat.

After roasting, it came out a really tempting golden-brown and looked and smelt good enough to put a halt to any horrific sheep stomach flashbacks.

I cut it open and spooned the stuffing onto warmed plates with creamy mashed tatties (potatoes), neeps (swede) and less-traditional but very tasty home-made chips.

Leftover offal stock mixed with onion, garlic and mustard made a gorgeous gravy and the clincher was a dram of strong, peaty Scotch, drizzled over the haggis before devouring.

This was the best haggis I’ve ever tasted and it’s certainly the kind of rich, hearty and wholesome food I crave more than once a year – which is a good job because with a freezer full of haggises, I’ll probably be living off the stuff till spring.

Burns Night is on January 25th, 2012