I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Another Lent has begun, and, as is our custom, we shall be observing a medieval-style Lent, with no meat, egg or dairy for the duration - saving one day each week, and a few exceptional cases. However, I've got a non-Lenten recipe or two in the hopper for write-ups - and this is one of them.

Sometimes, I get weird ideas about things to do with food. Sometimes, those things work out ... mostly-adequately - like the reverse Cock-a-Leekie thingie I did a couple of months ago. Sometimes, however, they are spectacular successes, like this week's offering. (Rarely, they are disasters. You don't get to see those here.)

This recipe hinges on the use of pork skin as both a container and a lubricating agent. If you are fortunate, you may be able to buy pork skin by itself; if not, you can peel it off a joint, a piece of pork belly, or some fatback yourself. If the place you get your meat sells a lot of skinless cuts of pork, it might be worth asking what they do with the skin ...

This dish is Not A Haggis, despite certain superficial similarities. Most crucially, it does not contain offal. (And it's goat, rather than sheep, which is a bit beside the point.) It's also not stuffed in a stomach, but in this modern age, neither are most haggises. What it does share with a haggis is excellent flavour and a nice shape.

• a carrot
• an onion
• 3 or 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 cup oats
• about 2 cups mince/ground meat (I used goat, but pork or lamb would work well)
• salt, perhaps a teaspoon
• black pepper, perhaps a half of a teaspoon
• half a teaspoon of fennel seed, if you are so inclined
• a good sized sheet of pork skin, 12"x8" or thereabouts if you can get it

We served it with steamed greens, but a salad or coleslaw would also be good. It's fantastic, if I say so myself. The fat from the skin keeps the farse moist, the skin itself gets crispy, and the oats in the filling provide a nice texture. You can, of course, do whatever you like with the spicing, or even use sausage, but if you've got good quality meat, then a simple and gentle spice mix works a treat.