Making Sausage

Bad blogger.  Bad, bad, bad blogger!  A 7-month-hiatus can't possibly increase readership, so I will apologize to you and get back to it: I'm sorry.  Here's a video about making sausage...

If you're reading this, you either want text instead of a video, or you clicked on the video, started watching and then exclaimed, "oh for the love of... this thing is 11 minutes long!"  Yeah, sorry about that.  It was a fun process and I got a little too giddy trying to make it all fit together.  Here is a written version.


Ingredients
5 lb. pork shoulder (also called butt or Boston butt)
3/4 lb. beefsteak (or really any cut of non-tendony beef - we used ground, actually)
garlic, minced
nutmeg (ew)
salt
pepper
fennel (optional)
red pepper flakes (optional)
pig intestines/casings (if making links)


Directions
The first thing you want to do is rinse and soak your intestine casings.  Yeah, it's gross, but you're making sausage.  The casings are going to come in a package in a sort of salty brine and so you want to rinse them and start to rehydrate.  Let them sit in a small bowl with an end sticking out - this way it will be easier to grab later.

Now that you have pig intestines sitting in a bowl on your counter (everyone's life ambition, right?), you can start preparing your meat.  Both cuts should be diced into 1-2" pieces.  Do not worry about exact size or uniformity; these are getting ground up.  Do keep them in separate bowls for now, though, and place them near your meat grinder (oh yeah, you need one of those).  You'll also want your minced garlic nearby - we started with a few minced cloves.

With either the fine or coarse cut disc in your grinder, start loading in meat and grind away!  You want a ratio of 3 parts pork to 1 part beef as you do this, adding in pinches of garlic here and there.  And don't forget a large bowl to catch all your ground yumminess.  When you get to the end, it will likely be difficult for your grinder to grasp the remaining chunks of meat and pull them through.  Never fear, simply take some of your ground product and put it back through.

*Please use caution while grinding - we want this to be made of pork and beef, NOT human fingers!*

When the meat is ground, it is time for what my family calls, The Argument Phase.  This is when you season - what you season with will be the result of who argues the most efficiently.  Garlic, salt and pepper are always a good start and we (not me, actually, but the rest of my family) like to put in some nutmeg.  Other popular ingredients include fennel seeds and red pepper (the latter for a hot Italian sausage).  Again, feel free to argue for whatever you want.  My brother, for example, argued quite vehemently for thyme.

When you believe you've seasoned well - take a chunk out of your bowl, flatten it and fry it up in a little pan with some oil.  Have everyone taste and then debate about what is missing.  We suggest seasoning lightly to begin with.  It's far easier to add more garlic or pepper than it is to add more meat!

If you are just making sausage to have ground sausage, you are done when the seasoning argument is complete.  You may cook immediately or freeze in chunks, blocks, cylinders, stars, infinity symbols, etc.  If you want a traditional string of sausage links, though, you must now case the ground meat.

You will use the same meat grinder, this time removing the cutting disc and putting the "casing funnely thing," as my brother calls it, on instead. Find the end of one of your casings and gently coax it open and over the tip of the instrument.  Then continue to thread the entire casing on - using a little of the water it's been soaking in to keep the casing and the "funnely thing".  Leave a little bit of the end of your casing unthreaded as you will need to tie off the end of the sausage link once it's filled.  Now, grind away!

You'll see the meat beginning to come out of the funnel and into the casing and will want someone standing at the end to support it.  That person can coax the product into a nice spiral as it continues to come out of the grinder.  When the whole casing is filled (also leaving a bit of the other end empty for making a knot), tie each end to prevent sausage leakage.  Then, at 6 inches or so, twist the casing a couple of times to make one link.  After the next 6 inches, twist the other way, and so on until you've reached the other end.

Ahhhhhh!  My casing broke!  Yeah, it'll do that.  If so, you can cut the long rope of sausages there and tie off each end.  It's not as long a finished product, but they still work as sausage.

I may have left something out.  If so, please let me know in the comment section below!

Autumn Apple Currant Pork Chops

Background

It's that time again, folks.  The leaves are turning (or have fallen!), the air is brisk, and I can see my husband's whole face light up when I mention the prospect of apple pie.  And since he's open minded, he doesn't just limit his apple consumption to pie form.  No, he'll also accept pig, as well.  This is a recipe I came up with by combining a couple of favorite pork comfort dishes.

This recipe is also distinctive because it more closely resembles how I typically cook.  Some of the amounts of ingredients are approximate, given that I tend not to measure things.  For the purposes of this blog, I try to post concrete measurements in my ingredient list.  But really, sometimes, you just want to go by feel. So here is an example of me going by feel.  I hope you enjoy!


Ingredients

2 2" pork chops or 4 1" pork chops
1 C. rice
olive oil
2 medium-large apples
1 C. broth (beef, chicken or veggie)
1/4 C. dryish white wine (whatever is turning to vinegar in the fridge)
corn starch
several t. rubbed sage
good handful of currants
1 small tomato, thinly sliced
1 small green pepper, thinly sliced
1 small onion, thinly sliced


Directions

Preheat oven to 350.

Start rice cooking in a 3-4 quart pot.

In a medium-large sauce pan, bring broth to a simmer. Add white wine and stir well. While stirring continuously, add enough corn starch to thicken broth to a light rue (kind of syrupy consistency). Add 1-2 t. dried rubbed sage. Pour out of pan and set aside.

In same pan, brown pork chops in a little olive oil. Salt and pepper both sides while browning. Do not cook all the way through. Place browned pork chops in the bottom of a deep baking dish (make sure dish is big enough for apples to fit around the pork chops and deep enough for rice to go on top).

Peel apples and chop them into bite-size chunks (I use the apple corer/slicer thing that cuts out the core and slices the apple into 8ths - then I cut each 8th in half). Sprinkle in bottom of baking dish around pork chops. Pour rue over the apples and chops.

The rice should be done cooking now. Fluff with fork and add currants and another 1-2 t. of sage. Mix well. Pour rice over top of chops/apples in baking dish.

Place sliced veggies on top of the rice (my mom always put them on top of where each chop was so it was easy to figure out where to dig out the meat - the rice will cover them up).

Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 1 hour.

Notes

• When I did this, I used 1 t. of sage in the sauce and 1 t. of sage in the rice.  I kind of lost the flavor because by the time you put it all together, it's a lot of food that sage has to battle. That's why I suggested 1-2 t. in each place. Same with the wine... the sauce smelled wonderful when I made it, but I lost the wine flavor in the whole dish... so again, maybe play it by ear.

• I used the 2" chops and I was nervous about them not cooking all the way through, so I browned them a little longer. Mistake. And hour was plenty to cook them through. They turned out a little dry - better by the fat :)

• If you aren't a sage fan, play around. Another flavor I really like with pork is tarragon, but playing with flavor is always fun. If you stumble upon something extraordinary, be sure to let us know!