more home made sausages - part 1

A few days ago I ventured into sausage making for the first time. I have been sitting on the fence about trying cured meat for the fear of indulging into a diet of too much red meat. What pushed me over the fence is the general poor quality of these products available in my town. Invested in a sausage stuffer I did when I seized on the opportunity of an open box on Amazon. Cannot beat a discount on already discounted item and free shipping. I made 2.5 lb of andouille. The result of my first attempt exceeded my expectation.

I have watch many NOLA cooking shows and have long wanting to cooking with this mystic to me sausage. All I know is it is very similar to Spain's chorizo. So I decided it is the sausage I would try to make first.

I have made many meals with these andouille sausages in the last few days. Here are some photos. As with most of my cooking I rarely strictly follow any recipe. You can call them inspired dishes of NOLA ones.

this is a jambalaya like dish with anduille and wild USA pawns - i slice the pawns in half as they are quite large

 yum!

 this one i decided to skip the roma tomato

 

 just as good

 i was watching NHK world and there is this program mention heavenly bamboo (it is really not bamboo) and that birds like the fruits; i didn't know they have fruits so i went out to my yard and see; sure enough

 these has fallen from the winter storms

 only a few berries left on the plant

 still more meals with andouille sausage

need a meal with low calorie - this dish is made with chinese dried goods; dried scallops from japan, dried shitake mushrooms and dried black fungus from china; i can do this dish very well now

 for a change i made a NOLA inspired dish with spaghetti instead of rice this time; i also added spinach

 in the recent arctic cold spell the hummingbirds are hunkering down; this one perched on my fan in guarding "it's feeder"; this is very unusual and goes shows their instinct when survival is at stake

it has been so cold this whole week and i worry for the hummingbirds' survival; i have to thaw the frozen nectar a few times a day

 making chinese braised beef in clear broth; this batch contains beef brisket and ox tail

i am getting to be very good at it now and am really into the clear broth style for its clean taste

i like my brisket chewy and the lining crunchy so it call for very precise timing

one of many ways to serve it - this is a bowl of rice soup noodle

i cannot pass off leeks when the price is good and the bundle is big; these are for a soup with pork and chicken stock

still more jambalaya with andouille sausage - this batch has fresh pacific mussels

 a second helping...

After my first batch of sausage with only 2.5 lb of pork I wanted to make the effort worthwhile. I was out shopping and saw this big bag of pork butt at Costco. Normally I prefer to buy pork from An Dong market because they sell the same pork from Carlton Farm that also supply Edelweiss delicatessen. I decided to buy it to avoid a drive in the thanksgiving holiday traffic.
just under 15 lbs

it turned out the pork butt package does not have enough fat; i have to take another trip to pick up some pork fat; finding pork fat can be more difficult than you think

I decided to make 5 lb of andouille and 5 lb of German sausage. Under the pressure of having 15 lb of raw pork and want to get the show on the road, I decided to loosely follow the recipe for weisswurst for the latter.

this is for the weisswurst

 this batch is for andouille

hand mixing the "weisswurst" - i used the spices commonly for making weisswurst except i didn't emulsify the sausage filling - something i would later learnt after i already made the sausages

 tasting the seasoning

i know what you're thinking...

 the lemon zest really adds the freshness to the weisswurst

 i made a tiny link to test the batch

As there is always a bit of meat left in the stuffer at the end you always left with some sausage meat without casing. I made a dinner with this andouille sausage.
this one with mushroom, cream, and blue cheese

 a breakfast with the weisswurst with german bread "Champion" bought from edelweiss

i would never imagine that home made sausage would taste this good; except the lack of pedigree it taste every bit as good as the sausages from edelweiss

a better photo taken with iPhone 5s - the dark specks are due to the black mustard seeds i ground instead of taking a trip to find the one that is not black; i poached this one in water at sub-boiling temperature as you supposed to with weisswurst

birdie hunkers down on the fiberglass panel of my outdoor kitchen - the ambient air was 13F that morning; for a few days the weather was blustery and cold with wind gusts as high as 40-50 mph even in town