Happy Sunday y’all and check out what we did for the very first time today!

My hubby, David, decided he wanted to learn how to make our own sausage, so he bought a machine that grinds the meat, and stuffs the sausage into casings. It’s a very labor intensive process, but so much fun too!

Yesterday, he bought us a deep freezer and a vacuum food saver sealer, now the sausage looks professional and we have a place to store our extra meat. The freezer in the house is part of our side-by-side refrigerator and we keep way too much meat for it all to fit. I got beaned in the head a couple of weeks ago by a pack of frozen bacon when it slid out while I was looking for something to pull out for dinner! Maybe that won’t happen now. 😁

Here we are from start to finish:

We made green onion sausage for our trial run. We started with a pork butt-about 8-10lbs. To that we added the correct amounts of green onions, onion, garlic, celery, and parsley (all minced by the way). Then the spices; kosher salt, ground black pepper, fresh thyme, cayenne pepper. We mixed all this well and set it in the fridge while we prepared the sausage casings. They have to be washed several times and soaked for 30 minutes. The meat has to be cold when you get ready to start stuffing it in the casing. We had also previously taste tested a pattie to check that the spices were correct. Not bad, slightly more salty than we wanted, and plenty spicy! 🌶

Right about this time, we got some visitors and took a break to visit. 

Then we proceeded to stuff the sausage and our company watched the start of the process before heading out to do their errands. They had stopped by to pick up some used floor mats that would go perfectly in his truck. The company was our son’s friend Ryan, his wife, Jenna, and their daughter Ruby. She will be three in about a week. They were as excited about the whole process as we were!

This being our first time, we didn’t think about twisting the sausage in short sections, so we had super long links. This is where the vacuum system came in handy. We cut the sections to the amounts we wanted and made and sealed them into vacuum sealed bags for freezing. It all looked so professional for our first time! I can’t wait to experiment with different flavors and types of meats and maybe once we get the system down pat, and create our own recipes, we may even sell some sausage! The next flavor I want to try is jalapeño and cheddar! Yum! 

We plan to smoke this sausage for part of the Thanksgiving feast, stay tuned for how it turns out! Now for round two of cooking as we make spaghetti for Sunday dinner! 
Don’t worry, we also watched our virtual church service while we worked, somehow we made it through most of the service with all the busyness going on.