It’s Tartan Week here in New York. Time to put on your kilt, break out the bagpipes, and have some haggis!

You haven’t heard of Tartan Week? Why, it’s a time-honored tradition dating all the way back to…this year. It used to be Tartan Day, and it started in 1997. Evidently, one day was not sufficient to celebrate all things Scottish, so now it’s been expanded.

The quintessential Scottish dish for such occasions is, of course, haggis. Haggis consists of sheep offal, suet, spices, onions, and oats. You stuff this concoction into a sheep’s stomach and boil it for three hours, and then serve it with rutabagas and potatoes. To most Americans, it sounds pretty awful.

The Scottish, however, revere haggis. The poet Robert Burns even penned an ode to it, “Address to a Haggis,” in which he calls haggis “Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!”

Haggis is eaten regularly in Scotland; too regularly, according to the Scottish government, who caused a furor in January when they placed haggis on a list of restricted foods for nursery schools.

“It’s not to say that haggis is not a good dish but because of its saturated fat and salt it’s not desirable for children to have it more than once a week,” Brian Ratcliffe, a nutritionist at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, told the BBC.

Offal aficionados were predictably outraged. “No harm can possibly come out of eating good haggis,” insisted butcher James Pirie, winner of the 2005 Scottish Haggis Master Championship. “We make terrific products for the kids using haggis. There’s not a great deal of fat in haggis.”

Supposing you wanted to make an authentic haggis (which I, for one, do not,) you could not do it legally in this country, because one of the ingredients, sheep’s lung, is illegal here, having been deemed "unfit for human consumption" by the USDA. Apparently, hardcore haggis enthusiasts have been known to smuggle sheep lungs into the U.S., so devoted are they to this dish.

Matt, a fan of offal himself, wants to make the haggis recipe from Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast, a cult classic whose subtitle, “Nose to Tail Eating,” succinctly sums up the culinary terrain it covers. However, since the book is British, the recipe does call for the verboten sheep lungs.

The Food Network’s Alton Brown provides an Americanized haggis recipe, minus the lungs but including the liver, heart, and tongue (collectively called “the pluck” by the Scots,) stuffed into the obligatory sheep’s stomach. Brown seems rather unenthusiastic about the haggis himself, though; after providing instructions on how to make it, he suggests, “Serve with mashed potatoes, if you serve it at all.”

Being of Scottish ancestry myself, I did want to celebrate my heritage in some small way beyond listening to Travis, Idlewild, Snow Patrol, the Trashcan Sinatras, and Belle & Sebastian (what is it about Scotland that produces such great indie bands)?

So I googled “healthy haggis,” which may be an oxymoron, but, happily, yielded a recipe for a vegetarian haggis that turned out to be amazingly good. I found the recipe on the website AllRecipes.com and modified it only slightly to make it a bit more moist and well seasoned. This haggis is loaded with good things like lentils, kidney beans, steel cut oats and nuts. I made it for dinner last night, and even Matt, despite hankering for a real haggis, had two heaping portions.

Kat’s Awfully Good Offal-Free Haggis:

Serves 4 to 6

1 tablespoon canola oil

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 medium carrot, finely chopped

4 ounces shitake mushrooms, finely chopped

2 cups vegetable broth

1/3 cup dried red lentils

1/4 cup cooked red kidney beans, mashed

3 tablespoons ground peanuts

2 tablespoons ground hazelnuts

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme

1 teaspoon dried rosemary

1/8 teaspoon allspice

pinch of cayenne pepper

dash of Worcestershire sauce

salt & pepper to taste

1 1/3 cups steel cut oats

1 egg, beaten

Heat the canola oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Sauté the onion for 5 minutes. Add the carrots and mushrooms and sauté for another 5 minutes. Stir in broth, lentils, kidney beans, nuts, soy sauce, lemon juice, thyme, rosemary, allspice, cayenne pepper, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add steel-cut oats, cover, and simmer for another 20 minutes.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Coat a 6 x 8 (or thereabouts) baking pan. Stir the egg into the saucepan, and transfer the mixture into the baking pan. Bake for about 30 minutes, till the haggis is firm and lightly browned on top.