Staycation Day 4: Taxes & Sausage

Today ended up being a lot busier than either of us had anticipated. I ran my 3 miles this morning (after another fantastic bacon, eggs and tater tots breakfast). Then we headed into town to have our taxes done and visit our friendly AAA office.

Let me begin by saying these two are never amused at my photo opportunities:

Identical Expressions

We went to Swingles after our tax appointment to get sausage casings. You know it's a good butcher shop when...

Swingles

Here's the Kitchen Aid meat grinder setup:

Kitchen Aid Mixer With Meat Grinder Attachment

And here's the actual grinding of the meat. We ran each batch through twice, to make it a little more tender. Then it ran back through to get stuffed in the casing.

The Grinding Of The Meat

Of course, Shadow wanted to know what was going on - he ended up spending most of this afternoon outside on the deck after this:

Is That Meat I Smell?

I think the grossest part of the whole process was the sausage casings. We opted for natural (read: intestines) instead of man made.

Rinsing The Casings

They come packaged in a very briny solution, so you have to rinse the heck out of them otherwise you'll have super salty sausage. We let them soak in really cold water in the sink for a while. Then you had to untangle one of them and feed it all the way onto the squirter thingy (that's the technical term):

My Second Phallic Picture On This Blog In 2 Days!

We were a little disappointed in how the attachment worked - it took a really long time to get the meat to dispense into the casing and the little plunger thingy pushed the meat down but then pulled it back up when you pulled it out. It was a very labor intensive process and got pretty frustrating.

Here are the final products:

Garlic & Pepper Sausage

Garlic On The Left, Spicy On The Right

All in all, it was fun, but it took about four hours from start to finish and pretty much everything in our kitchen was covered in raw meat and needed to be hosed down. We made a garlic & pepper sausage as well as a hot Italian sausage - using a combination of beef and pork. We noticed they were a little drier than we would have liked - I think that had something to do with the beef. We might need to pick fattier cuts of meat as well. But the flavors were definitely there! I think we might try some fancier sausages next time (like chicken & apple) to play around with the flavors. The other thing we noticed is that the colder the meat was, the easier it went through the grinder - almost frozen worked best.

It was a pretty busy day - now it's time to watch some "Justified" and "tosh.0"!