Sausage

Adam and I discovered that we have a lot of meat in the freezer.  A LOT of meat.  We've been trying to cook through most of it this winter, but there's only two of us.  Compounding that is the fact that most of the chicken and turkey we have is from birds that were butchered when they were way too mature, so they're really only good for soups that cook for a day and a half.  Or sausage.

(Turkey with marjoram, white wine, sage, and garlic)

We have quite a few sausage books and a lot of recipes that we've been meaning to get around to "someday," so this weekend we broke out the grinder and got to work making some freezer space.

  We used the Kitchenaid meat grinder attachment for part of the batches.  We discovered that we did not have the sausage stuffer attachment that we thought we had, but luckily Adam's parents had an electric grinder/stuffer and we were able to finish using that.  I have to say that while the Kitchenaid attachments do a lot of things really really well- sausage grinding is not one of their finer things.  The electric grinder/stuffer did a much better and faster job than the Kitchenaid did.  It would probably work just fine if you're only breaking it out once in awhile, but if you have any intention of making sausages on a semi-regular basis, a grinder/stuffer that is designed solely for that purpose is probably the way to go.

We found natural sausage casings at Weis, which was really lucky.  Adam had a LOT of fun playing with intestines, probably more fun than any person should have.  But he did a pretty amazing job of stuffing for his first time- hardly any air bubbles.  

Southwestern Turkey with jalapeno, chipotle pepper, and cumin.  This one was our favorite!

Up next we're also going to do an Italian turkey and a Roman chicken sausage with peppers and Romano cheese.