Sausage Party!

So, Saturday I had a sausage party at my place. No, it’s not what you probably think. Some people came over Saturday afternoon and we made sausage from 40 pounds of pork, spices, and the effort supported by tools.

And despite its name there were women there. Although they just sat around and talked while the men were in the kitchen doing the work.

(OK, that’s not completely true. They helped. One actually made some vegetarian sausage that was quite good).

We are modern men.

So that’s what we started with. We quickly got out the knives, cutting boards, and as we began to set up the various other devices that we would need later, three of us got to cutting up the meat which filled up lots of bowls of diced pork. This process was when the penis jokes started to surface. They would dominate the rest of the day.

We are modern and immature men.

While preparing we also tried some miracle fruit. If you don’t know what this marvelous stuff is, open this up in another tab right now. If you don’t have a browser with tab capabilities, then do something about that after you are done reading this. My favorite food of the day with the miracle fruit was lime, but the lemon and the bitter pale ales were good too (although I won’t divulge how many pale ales that entailed).

Once we got everything into manageable sizes, we began to get the grinder going and put them in a large pot that I would usually reserve for making home made gravy (pasta sauce, as some call it).

Once we got all approximately 33 pounds of meat (40 pounds minus bone, skin, extraneous fat, etc) ground up, we began to separate it into groups to spice differently to make different kinds of sausages.

We first made Bratwurst.

Later we made breakfast sausage, hot Italian sausage, and finally endui. Here’s a shot of the finished Italian, which was pretty spicy, but could have been hotter despite using 10 drops of Pure Cap to a relatively small amount of meat. Usually two drops of a meal between two people makes anything pretty hot. I will put three to four drops into something I am making for myself, but that’s only because I have a freakish tolerance for spiciness.

After we made the sausage, we, of course, got the grill fired up and grilled some of it and ate it on fresh rolls, with mustard, or just by themselves. The sausage ended up being perfect for the trip that my friend Dan (whose birthday is today, so happy birthday Dan!) and I took on Sunday. But I’ll have to leave that story for tomorrow.