Gluten-free Scottish shortbread

Most of my baking is at least semi-healthy. I try to incorporate vegetables and high-nutrient foods like flaxseed and quinoa whenever I can. I tend to reduce the sugar and fat most recipes call for.

Not this time.

I love shortbread. I don’t make it often because I know it’s basically straight butter and sugar. But I could think of no better dessert to make on a weekend dedicated to Scottish food.

Modern haggis with neeps and tatties

I had proper haggis once. Well, as proper as you can get in Canada, anyway. It was at a Robbie Burns Day celebration in the small town of Ayr, and if I remember correctly, the haggis was from a specialty shop in Hamilton, Ontario. There was an old guy in a kilt who recited “Address to a Haggis” and, at the appropriate moment, stabbed the haggis with a dagger to let the “gushing entrails” spill forth, “warm-reekin, rich!” What little I got was delicious but years later, I don’t remember the details of exactly how it tasted. I have every reason to believe it was stuffed in a sheep’s stomach and the “entrails” involved heart, lungs, kidneys and assorted other parts I prefer not to think too much about.

This is not that kind of haggis.

This haggis was inspired by my friends Dan and Meredith, who had/have a food blog called The Haggis and the Herring, a name that brings together their respective British and Jewish heritages in the sort of cultural mashup I love. Dan, sadly, died suddenly about a year and a half ago, and his brother Abisaac, who runs the blog Gluten Free Edmonton (it’s sheer coincidence that Abisaac’s wife is celiac and that Edmonton is my hometown – I didn’t meet Dan there), posted a slow cooker haggis recipe in memory of Dan on The Haggis and the Herring.

My haggis too is for you, Dan. I miss you.

Kids’ activities – Scotland

Introducing a preschooler to Scotland

My husband is Scottish by blood but his ancestors immigrated to Canada so long ago, not even my father-in-law, who has diligently researched his family history, knows where in Scotland they came from. So until our Scottish weekend, my four-year-old didn’t know she was ethnically half Scottish. She had heard vaguely of Scotland but not much more.

I started by showing her a map of the world, pointing out Canada, where she was born, England, where she lives now, and Scotland. I then showed her this Union Jack GIF, which shows how the flags of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England were layered on top of one another to form the Union Jack, which she is familiar with.

Gung Haggis Fat Choy!

I first heard the term “Gung Haggis Fat Choy” when I was a teenager in Western Canada. It was coined by “Toddish McWong,” a Vancouver student of Chinese descent whose university asked him to help out with their Robbie Burns Day celebrations. Since then, Gung Haggis Fat Choy has, according to McWong himself, “come to represent a celebration of combining cultures in untraditional ways.” And that is what this blog, my family and I are all about.

I’m a Canadian of Japanese descent and my husband is a Canadian of Scottish descent. We now live in England. We have two daughters, aged one and four, and I just went back to working full time after the New Year. Since I started working, I’ve gotten into the habit of doing a ton of cooking on the weekend and freezing some of the output so we can have dinner on the table quickly when I get home after work during the week. Since I love trying different types of international cooking and since I want to teach my older daughter about the world, I had the idea of doing a particular country’s food and tying it in with related educational activities every weekend.