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.