Only in Athens can you have your moussaka with a colorful rainbow-bright salad of shiny purple olives, green peppers, and red tomatoes,  a side plate of olive oil and herb-dusted grilled bread and an accompanying view of the Parthenon.

You can also visit one of the most hardcore, badass, no-yuppie-bullsh*t central markets I’ve ever had the pleasure (and underlying sense of intimidation) of wandering through. This ain’t no Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid , lushly teeming with expensive port and tapas with caviar and design nerd tea towels.  This is a serial killer basement of unidentified animal dismemberment. If you’re squeamish, I’d just stop right now…

Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And I’m doing it again.

Now, imagine your local butcher shop (which may not exist as a concept if you live in the States) and multiply it by about fifty. Then fill it with dozens of men in bloody aprons carrying brutishly large knives who all will approach you as you walk through (admittedly, somewhat unprepared in a tank top and short-ish skirt) and very loudly proclaim in Greek and broken English and attempted Chinese that they very much want to…be your friend. Or something like that. Unfortunately, I  don’t speak Greek.

It was a serious gauntlet of dead animal parts and aggressively friendly butchers.  Here’s what it looked like.

It’s obviously not the kind of market where you go to, say, buy a snack.  Unless you like eating…what are these, dinosaur heads?

Sorry.  I tried to warn you. I have absolutely no idea what animal those came from.  It was as far away from sanitized, styrofoam-and-plastic-wrapped, this-only-differs-from-a-steak-in-that-it-needs-a-few-minutes-on-the-grill, supermarket meat as I’ve ever been.  You can’t pretend that these don’t come from an animal when the entire skinned body is hanging in front of you.

A few of the stalls appeared to exist only in order to showcase the parts of the animal you never knew existed.  The parts that really should remain hidden inside a body cavity and never viewed by anyone except a trained professional. I’m partially fascinated to know if these items can ever be transformed through the magic of cooking into something fantastically delicious, and partially quite sure I never want anything of that texture to get anywhere near my mouth.

I wonder what this little girl is thinking about the enormous buckets of animal intestines in front of her.

After extricating myself from the clutches of several enthusiastically chatty men wielding cleavers…

I made my way into the seafood section. It felt like wandering into a black market aquarium back room, with  seawater an inch deep sloshing over my sandals.  You could buy just about every conceivable fish, ranging from the smallest of sea creatures…

to what might possibly be some sort of bisected shark body.

The beast above looked much bigger in person than it does in the photo. It was most assuredly the largest diameter of fish body I have personally ever seen for sale in one piece.

You could also purchase nearly every possible variation of bottom-dwelling crustacean, mollusk, or bivalve…

small fresh fish, I think sardines, by the shovelful…

…and what looked to be their delicious cured counterparts packed in salt.

Since I was flying back to London that evening and didn’t want to be seen as:

A) a crazy person bringing raw fish on a plane by my thoroughly disgusted fellow passengers, or

B) an absolute psychopath by a poor airport employee encountering a severed and skinned animal head during a routine security check

I refrained from purchasing anything in the main section of the market.

I did, however, continue to wander around the outskirts in search of exciting Greek edibles and more snack-friendly fare and found a few tiny little storefronts full of herbs and nuts and dried fruit. I bought almonds and figs and honey and tasted dried cherries from a nice elderly Greek couple.

I love the endless displays of dried, harvested, cured, and otherwise well-preserved food…

huge vats of raisins and enormous boxes of nuts of all varieties…

and a great wall of herbs and spices of all colors.

We’ll end with my favorite daily snack of my altogether too short trip to Athens: the ubiquitous seeded circle of bready deliciousness, available on nearly every street corner of the city.

Okay, actually, we have to end by coming back to where we started. From far off in the distance with a table of Greek food or up close and personal under the construction scaffolding, the Parthenon is an incredible sight…

When I was told we’d be celebrating our Rambling Restaurant Burns Night with poetry, whiskey, and homemade haggis stabbing, my thoughts went like this:

1. Awesome! I’ve always wanted to try haggis.

2. By the way, what’s Burns Night?

3. And while I’m asking…what, exactly, is haggis?

4.  A sheep heart, lung, and liver minced and mixed with oatmeal and onions and stuffed inside a sheep stomach? <gulp> We are definitely going to need that whiskey.

Haggis, to most ignorant Americans like myself, is one of those iconic Scottish associations like kilts, bagpipes, and Mel Gibson covered in blue facepaint and exuding a throaty roar for ‘FREEEEDOOOM!’ We might have heard of it but almost certainly wouldn’t be able to say what it’s made of, only that it has something to do with terrifying animal parts and probably shouldn’t ever be consumed until after seven shots of Scotch.

Well, let me set the record straight on two fronts.

1. As much as you may love William Wallace in a skirt, kilts weren’t invented for another three centuries (one of the many twists of truth contributing to Braveheart being second on a list of ‘most historically inaccurate’ movies ever made).

2.  Haggis is, shockingly, absolutely delicious.

However, it took quite a long time and a lot of work to get it to that point. And I’ll be  honest, there was a fair amount of  grimacing, gagging, nose-holding, and are-we-really-serving-this-to-paying-customers?-questioning along the way.  It all started with my haggis-making partner-in-crime, foodrambler, hunting in vain and then finally securing three lamb’s plucks – the windpipe, heart, lungs and liver – for our haggis adventure. Following this recipe from the Guardian by Tim Hayward, she began the adventure the previous evening by cutting out the windpipes (blecch), boiling the plucks for several hours then leaving them to cool overnight in the murky cooking liquid.

A rubbery white sheep heart above and a massive chunk of liver below. Not exactly the most appetizing start to a meal, is it?  Don’t worry though, there is deliciousness to come…

Once out of the liquid and cut into cross-sections, the lungs were smooth and vaguely spongy while the heart was uncomfortably pink and muscly looking.

Being the intrepid culinary explorers/deluded masochists we are, we sliced off minute pieces of the heart, lung, and liver to taste them in all their unadulterated glory.  I’m sure you’re not surprised, but this turned out NOT to be a good idea. Offal is generally not the most appetizing of foods when you haven’t added any additional seasoning or flavor. Then add in the fact that the innards were ice cold and straight out of a disturbingly sewage-colored meat bath and both of us ended up jumping up and down and squealing in disgust at the musty lumps of chilled sheep innards in our mouths.

Lesson learned, we returned to the daunting task at hand. Dicing six onions was the easy part. Next, we tossed the heart and lung into the food processor and pulsed it gently into a fine mince.

Next, we grated the liver in the food processor to avoid the pasty textured chunks from turning into pate. Here’s a photo from foodrambler’s haggis post of me working the magimix on the meat.

I think the expression on my face is veering between skepticism, bemusement, horror and disgust. Note how I am as far as humanly possible away from the food processor in a vain attempt to avoid directly inhaling the stench of chopped lamb bits.  Below, the pungent strands of sheep liver.

All the dicing, slicing, and mincing of the heart, livers, and lungs began to fill the kitchen with a distinctly unpleasant smell. The thought crossed both our minds simultaneously: this smells exactly like cat food. Then the uncomfortable realization came to us…in fact, this is what cats eat. We are literally making cat food.

As you can see, it looked like cat food too. But just when we couldn’t really hold our noses much longer, we started mixing in the onions lying underneath the offal mince and all of a sudden, the smell changed. The sharp onion scent cut into the decaying meaty odor and the mixture somehow became warm and almost familiar, like the rich wafting steam of a slow-cooked stew.  The transition was aided by the inclusion of a generous amount of salt, white pepper, sage, thyme, and mace (the outer layer of nutmeg) for a layered and wintry hint of spices.

The general smell of the kitchen was further enhanced by the comforting aroma of toasted oatmeal, both of the rolled and Irish steel cut variety, which we wacked into the oven until lightly browned and then added to the pot.

But haggis wouldn’t be complete without one last element of grossness and that came in the form of eight boxes of shredded dried suet.

I had to look up ‘suet‘ on wikipedia to even find it in the grocery store – in case you’re wondering, it’s the raw fat that surrounds beef kidneys.  It looks like rodent turds made of candle wax.

Once we’d added a few ladlefuls of the sheep pluck stock to moisten and plunged our hands deep into the pot to mix, the haggis was smelling remarkably good and ready to be cooked.

Except, unfortunately, due to a stolen sheep stomach incident at Selfridge’s as well as a mail-order mishap with a backup ox bung (the attractively named last yard of a cow’s large intestine) we had nothing to stuff our haggis into.

Forced to experiment, we came up with a bunch of alternate showcases for our haggis:

1. Steamed in the oven by surrounding scoops in a layer of plastic wrap and then aluminum foil.

2. Oven roasted

3. Pan-fried

4. Formed into balls, dipped into batter, and deep fried. Having just acquired a deep fat fryer for Rambling Restaurant, you can expect to see a lot of deep fried items making an appearance on this blog.  Right up until my first heart attack.

5. Finally, after playing around a bit in a game of What Tastes Good Deep Fried? (Answer: EVERYTHING!) the ultimate haggis preparation came to us in a simultaneous bizarre great-minds-think-alike moment.

I present to you – Haggis. Stuffed into an English muffin. And deep fried.

It’s a Boston creme donut gone wrong or maybe so right – a rich, warm, meaty inside surrounded by a crunchy, oily,  golden exterior.  It was shockingly, decadently delicious, but I couldn’t eat more than two bites without feeling my arteries harden in protest.

The verdict of the haggis cooking comparison? Steamed was unanimously voted the best, as it allowed the oatmeal to cook, soften, and become infused with the intense meaty flavors of the offal. The roasted was okay, the pan-fried was too dry and crunchy with bits of oatmeal, and the deep-fried options were delicious but way too over the top for a meal ending with deep fried Mars bars.  Instructions for that coming up soon…

All in all, haggis making was an entertaining, educational, at times both delicious and disgusting experience.  Along with the traditional accompaniments of neeps (mashed swede, or rutabaga), tatties (potatoes) and cranachan (a Scottish dessert of whipped cream, honey, whiskey, raspberries and toasted oatmeal), my understanding of Scottish culinary brilliance has increased by leaps and bounds over the past few weeks. Add in a real Scot reading Burns’ Address To A Haggis followed by a stabbing…and the haggis experience is complete.

Deer in Ithaca are so populous that they’re essentially pests – destroying gardens, disrupting the ecosystem, and all too often meeting unfortunate ends in car accidents or starving in the winter. When Daniel’s dad offered Dan the chance to go deer hunting, we were all thrilled. Now, before you close the book on us savages, let me say this: we don’t believe in hunting for sport, or for trophies, but we loved the idea of getting another step closer to our food, and decreasing our dependence on factory farmed meat.

So, a few weekends ago, the Ithaca FamilyStyles gang experienced just how complicated and incredible meat really is. Sure, we’ve gutted fish and cared for livestock that would eventually become food, and I like to think that we’re thoughtful about and appreciative of the work and care and life involved in producing meat. But, butchering the deer that Daniel killed (with one shot, by the way) on his family’s land, was a whole new, up-close and personal experience for all of us. This time, we were responsible for seeing the animal through from death all the way to neat packages in the freezer.

And it was fascinating. For more pictures, and the occasional rumination, down the rabbit hole we go!

Warning: These pictures feature meat in a pretty serious way – view at your own risk! (Just so you know, I considered making a joke about “rawness,” but decided against it. You’re welcome.)

Daniel and Max worked in the below-freezing addition for about an hour to skin and take apart the deer. Check it:

They did an incredible job, considering we’ve never done any butchering and it was totally freaking freezing out. We brought cuts of meat inside one by one.

We got to work cleaning the meat, breaking it down into smaller pieces, and removing the silverskin. It was amazing to see what the incredibly beautiful, complex muscles and meat looked like before we processed it. We reserved all the bones and other bits for making stock.

A few hours later, we had maybe 20-25lbs of venison sitting pretty in the freezer. We fried up a little bit in the Bartholomew’s ancient cast iron pan – it was crazy tasting. Incredibly fresh and extremely tender, the venison (or at least those little bits) had an amazing bite, or maybe sting, to it, that rose up in the back of our throats like an aftertaste.

Since then, we’ve dabbled in pot roast, curry, frenched ribs, chopped liver, sauteed heart, and, when we’re feeling lazy, pan-fried tidbits over rice or with veggies. There’s still plenty in the freezer, so look out for more culinary action!