Teamwork: Sausage

I am glad the Giants won. I do not care for New England and I think that coach is an utter slob. (I dislike him so much I'm not even going to bother figuring out how to spell his name.)

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Mr. Big Food and I spend a considerable amount of time in the kitchen yesterday-- about five hours. We worked together to produce a bunch of stuff. The highlight of our production was 14 1/2 pounds of homemade sausage: Three pounds of Pennsylvania Dutch, five pounds of Sweet Italian, and six and one-half pounds of pork sausage. It's curing in the fridge right now, and then it will go into the freezer. This much sausage should last us three to four months.

One of the many nice things about making your own sausage is that you know exactly what's in it.

To make homemade sausage, you need only one specialized piece of equipment-- a meat grinder or grinding attachment for your mixer.

This is an electric grinder. When we first started making sausage, we used a hand-cranked table top model.

A scale is useful if you make sausage on the scale that we do.

Mr. Big Food and I each have our own tasks in the sausage making process. 

 

Naturally, Mr. Big Food is in charge of getting the meat, which he collects week to week, from the deep freezer.

Priced right.

When we're ready to begin, he cuts it up.

Another nice thing about doing it yourself is that you can make your sausage as lean as you like.

 

And processes it through the meat grinder. While he's doing that, I begin collecting the other ingredients, and supplies.

I think these are the spices for the Sweet Italian.

I-- because my hands have not been handling raw pork-- am in charge of measuring the Tender Quick, spices, and what not into the bowl of ground meat. Mr. Big Food mixes it all up together with his hands.

And then he divides it, I weigh it, he shapes it, plops it down on a piece of plastic wrap that's been sprayed with cooking spray, I roll it into a log and put it in a freezer bag.

It's just that simple!

Then we move onto the next batch.

When we've finished, we clean the kitchen! Teamwork!