Freestyle Sausage

Happy New Year!!

We finished up the sausage so late on Saturday that I figured I'd swing the pictures into their own blog post.  So I left off yesterday with a picture of the food grinder grinding out some fresh ground beef.  Today's picks up loking much the same, except with cubed, seasoned pork.  Here's a shot of the chorizo in progress:

and the chorizo all bagged up and ready for weigh-in on our new scale:

J plans to use the chorizo in dishes so this turned out to be the much easier of the two types of sausage we made.  I plan to use the breakfast sausage as a side for our breakfasts, and I prefer it as links, so of course we had to try out the sausage stuffing attachment and the sausage casings I got J for Christmas.

Now, let me insert here that there are any number of totally inappropriate jokes or comments that could be made in this post.  That said, my folks read this blog, so I'm going to leave out the one or two that J and I came up with.  Feel free to make up your own and laugh on the inside.  So, moving on.

The breakfast sausage starts much like the chorizo, but after the pork was ground into sausage, we ran it back through the food grinder with the sausage stuffing attachment attached.  Before you can turn the machine on, though, you have to measure out a length of casement, tie a knot in one end, and slide the casing entirely onto the attachment.  Then you turn the machine on and procede to fill the casing, like this:

Actually, I found it easier to twist off links as the casing filled, so our second and third casings didn't coil up neatly like in the picture above.  I didn't realize until we started that this was going to be a two person, four hand kind of job, so there aren't nearly as many pictures as I'd hoped to take.  I did manage to take one of the second and third casings on the scale.  We ended up with about a pound and a half of breakfast links between all three casings.

Aren't they cute??  We cooked the extra that didn't fit into the third casing and were very pleased with it, too.

Between the sausage making and the Big Bang Theory marathon on TBS, J and I had a pretty boring but thoroughly enjoyable New Year's Eve.  While it wasn't the weekend we had planned, it was a nice way to close out 2011.