Sausage Making Day Again!

I am tired and my hands look like prunes! After mentioning our first sausage making endeavor last January to many of our friends, we have been invited to a homemade sausage tasting. So, in anticipation of the big tasting, we embarked on Sausage Making Round Two. Dom spent the morning chopping 18 pounds of pork butt, and another 9 pounds of pork trimmings and belly. I crushed the fennel and coriander seeds and combined the spices and herbs. Then I soaked and rinsed over 150 feet of natural pork casing (intestines.) Yum! Dom stirred all the chopped meat together with the spice mix adding water to make sure the spices were evenly distributed. We put the meat in the fridge to marinate for a few hours.

Homemade Sausage Recipe:
25 lbs. pork
3/4 cup salt
1/4 cup fennel seed, crushed
1 tablespoon coriander, crushed
2/3 cup paprika
2 tablespoons crushed red pepper
2 tablespoons cayenne, ground
2 teaspoons black pepper, finely ground
1 teaspoon black pepper, cracked
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon dried oregano leaves
2 cups water (to help blend the spices)

We set up the grinder with the medium grinding plate and the sausage stuffer, and ground a test batch. Steve arrived just as we took the test batch off the heat. We decided that more red pepper, salt, paprika and 1/4 cup sugar were needed. We re-mix the batch and loaded the casings onto the stuffing attachment.

It is counter-intuitive, but water is your biggest friend in the sausage stuffing process. Keeping your hands clean, and keeping the casings and newly prepared sausage wet are extremely helpful. The moisture makes clean up a bit easier as well. Additionally, it is much easier to grind cold meat than warm. Using smaller batches of meat to grind while chilling the rest makes for a better end result.

After 2 hours and 20 minutes, I tied off the last link of sausage. We packaged the sausage in packages and remembered to write the weight on each package before placing them in the freezer. There is an old saying that the two things you should never see being made are laws and sausage. The wonderful thing about making your own sausage is that you know every ingredient that is included; no chemical preservatives or mystery meat. The only gross thing about it is the shear volume of meat and spices that it takes to make a batch large enough to warrant the time it takes to set up, produce and clean up.

It is a good thing we like sausage; the freezer is full of it! A shower is going to feel wonderful...

Lemonade Season

As much as I love homemade fresh lemonade, we don't always have lemons on hand or time to make it from scratch. So, recently we purchased a 5.13 pound container of Country Time Lemonade at Costco (of course!) We had forgotten how much we liked it! "Not too tart and not too sweet" according to their original 1976 commercial with "Grandpa, who is the best judge of good old fashioned taste." We blew through the first container, which according to the container made 8.5 gallons, in two weeks and are half way through our second container of the summer. Is it as healthy as drinking water? No, but Country Time has 40% less sugar than regular soda. It has 16 grams of sugar in an 8 ounce glass while a typical soda has about 27 grams of sugar per 8 ounce glass. It also has 10% of the RDA of Vitamin C per glass. So, I'm headed to the kitchen to mix up an icy, cold pitcher, and then I'm going to "sit back and drink it all in."

Last Minute Brunch

Now that the boys are teenagers, they manage to sleep in the mornings, while Dom and I still get up early. We have always been early-risers. So while waiting for the boys to wake up, Dom headed to Costco (of course!) to "pick up a few things."

He arrived home with a car-full of "things," but nothing specifically for breakfast. After looking at the clock and seeing that it was now 11:00am, we decided that perhaps a Brunch was in order.

So after a while of perusing the pantry and pondering the possibilities, we decided to make gnocchi with peppered bacon and (gorgeous, fresh, organic) chanterelles sauteed with fresh thyme and butter. To go with this, we sliced an heirloom tomato and drizzled it with EV olive oil, added a few "globs" of Chèvre and a chiffonade of fresh basil. We decadently opened a bottled of champagne and enjoyed a long leisurely meal.

Happy Father's Day, Dom!

Father's Day Gift

It is nigh onto impossible to buy my husband a gift! He sees something he wants and immediately buys it without a single consideration to whether there might be a pending holiday for which someone might need a gift idea. The guys had been planning to replace his stolen GPS device as a Father's Day gift since April. Two weeks before Father's Day he brought one home from Costco. He saw a leather journal he loved at Summerfest that the guys were going to surprise him with , and he bought a similar one on eBay the same night. Frustrating!!!

So, they were thrilled to have come up with a gift that they knew Dom wanted and had not purchased. We trotted off to Cook's Warehouse in Ansley Mall for the perfect gift. Sonny had seen him admiring a particular knife weeks before and was confident this was the perfect gift. He wrote two poems; one for Dom to read before he opened the gift:

Every day is Father’s Day
Every day’s a feast
You always make us laugh away
So you get what is helpful in the least

In the past years we
Have waited till the 11th hour
But Nic and I both agree
This is better than a whimsy flower

So now it is time to open up your present
It’s nice I will admit
We are giving you our consent,

To go ahead and open it…

And one for after he opened it:

A knife, a knife

A very special one
Yours for the rest of your life
Gifted to you by your Sons

Every day is Father’s Day
Ever day’s a feast
But now you have a special way
In which to cut the beast!!!

Seizure Salad

The guys have been helping out in the kitchen more and more. Nic loves Caesar salad and has taken on the task of making the dressing whenever we plan to have salad with dinner. Last night Nic made his dressing, but thought it had too much lemon, so his solution was to add more garlic. We all sat down to dinner and our palates were hit with the hot pungency of too much garlic. Everybody learns from their mistakes! I doubt Nic will add more than 2 cloves of garlic again.

Garlic is a key component in countless Italian recipes, but we don’t always want that pungent raw flavor. Raw garlic’s harshness comes from a compound called “allicin”, which forms as soon as the clove’s cells are ruptured and continues to build as it sits. Since the citric acid in lemon juice hastens the conversion of harsh-tasting allicin to more mellow compounds called thiosulfonates, disulfides, and trisulfides, we recommend steeping sliced garlic in the lemon juice while you get the other ingredients ready. Heating the sliced garlic in the olive oil is another method to mellow the garlic which produces the same milder-tasting compounds that form when the garlic is steeped.

This delicious salad was originated by Caesar Cardini who had a small hotel and restaurant in Mexico not far from the California border. During Prohibition, the Hollywood crowd would drive to Mexico to party. Apparently on the Fourth of July, 1924, celebrants arrived in droves and the kitchen ran low on food. However, there was plenty of lettuce left (in those days, Americans weren't wild about salad) so Caesar made a salad that was as much a performance as food. It became an instant hit!

Dressing:

• 1 large egg (dropped in boiling water for 60 seconds, shell on)
• 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• 4 anchovy fillets (or 1 1/2 teaspoons anchovy paste)
• 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 pinch salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• A few drops of Tabasco sauce to taste
• 1/3 cup virgin olive oil

2 medium heads of romaine lettuce (outer leaves removed and thick stems removed)
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
Fresh croutons or garlic toast

Place egg, Worcestershire sauce, anchovies, lemon juice, garlic, salt, pepper, mustard, and Tabasco sauce in a food processor and pulse. Slowly add in olive oil. The dressing will start to emulsify. Adjust flavor to individual preference. You can add a little red wine vinegar or more lemon juice to thin. Shred lettuce into bite-sized pieces and coat well with dressing. This is best done by hand. Add some grated cheese and croutons while mixing. Top with more grated cheese, croutons (and any remaining anchovy filets) before serving.