Sunshine & Sausage Making

Now that is an odd title I do admit but since my photos include a little bit of both I thought it fit *grin*.

The sun graced us today with its warmth and light and it felt so good after the last bout of rain we were soaked with. After lunch we bundled up and set out for a walk to burn off some extra energy from being house bound and searched for interesting finds along the way. We admired the snow still clinging to the highest mountain peaks, spied on little Sparrows and Spotted Towhees and at one point my 5 year old even ripped his boots off so that he could walk barefoot over a bunch of clumped moss along the roadside LOL. Now that would have made a good photo. Oh how I wish I had brought my camera with me!!

We have finally finished putting our cow into the freezer which is such a relief. It was two very long days of cutting and wrapping from morning till night and tired aching feet and backs but the sight of our freezer bursting to the top with those brown paper packages makes it all worth it.

Our favorite part of the whole process though is making sausage :)
I use a mix of 3/4 beef to 1/4 pork, fresh garlic and onions run through the grinder along with the meat and a bunch of spices mixed in to make our sausage meat. I don't add any extra fat or fillers, just the basics and then once its all mixed together Hubby feeds it into our grinder which has a handy little sausage stuffing attachment and I control the sausage casings, filling them uniformly for twisting into links later.

The whole process moves along quite quickly and if you ever need to buy a very economical meat grinder with a lot of punch I highly recommend Moulinex. We have a Moulinex HV6 and it has two plates for course and fine grinding, sausage horn and a reverse function in the even that it jams and we have been using it for the last 9 years. It has ground all our beef that has been butchered since purchasing it and we finally had to sharpen the blade this time around as it was a bit dull. I'm not sure if you can still get the HV6 but I see there is a newer model now available :)

So here they are all twisted into links and portioned into dinner sized amounts. They are drier than a normal store bought sausage understandably since we don't add any additional fat but they make up for it in taste and I know exactly what is in them :)

Hugs,
Rosina