Homemade Sausage & Egg Sandwich And Hash

On sausage smoking day, I knew I would be busy and would need a good breakfast to see me through the day.  So, after I got the sausage into the smoker, I made a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich from the previous days stuffing errors - the dark on the egg is sausage picked up from using the same skillet.

It was barely edible but I managed to choke it down.  I've gotten a lot of blogging mileage from this sausage experience and I look forward to the next one which will likely be chorizo or Texas hot links, or both.

Our St Patrick's Day meal was good, but it's the corned beef leftover meals I really like, such as this one.

Have a good one.

Larry

Our St. Patrick’s Day Meal

Last year we had corned beef and carrots cooked together and our cabbage and potatoes as colcannon, but this year Bev has said she preferred they all be cooked together. I’m fine with that, but since I really liked the colcannon I decided to make it as well – the Irish wouldn’t think twice about having potatoes two ways. Bev made Irish soda bread last year but mistakenly added a stick of butter, which made it into something else. I convinced her to give it another try without the butter.

So Thursday morning, I trimmed off a lot of the fat cap and the fat between the point and flat and into the crock pot went the corned beef covered with water and with two of the spice packets they provided with it – had an extra from the pastrami I made.  We used Skylark Brand corned beef and I would buy it again.  We cooked it all day and added the carrots, potatoes, and cabbage in that order through the day.

We went errand running, then came home and I began juicing some of the grapefruit for a Salty Dog or some. Bev decided she had to have one to celebrate the occasion.

To make a long story even longer, after seeing the food we had in the crockpot and a couple of salty dogs we said the heck with the bread and the colcannon and just enjoyed the crockpot items - we're retired after all.  Here’s my plate - it's a shame we had to cut off so much of the potatoes and still ended up with brown places.

Daughter, Wende, and SIL, Pat, came over and we had a nice evening. I have a coat-of-arms that says Doolittle originated in Ireland although I’ve always thought it was English, but it doesn’t matter, either I am or pretended to be Irish for the day.
I'm taking Bev and SIL Pat to the airport this morning for 10 days in the Caribbean while I whip the grounds into shape and dogsit.  I'm glad I have several blogs in the que as cooking may be a little sparse.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry

Baby Let Me Be Your Salty Dog

Sweetie Pie had her spring haircut Friday - isn't she cute?

I've got about nine blog posts lined up ion my que (I usually have 3-4) and I normally try to post them in the order in which they occurred, but these will be coming more to spread out the topices, rather than 5 smoked sausages in a row - so they may show up in an illogical order.

I love fresh squeezed citrus fruit juice, but we did not have a good device for dealing with the larger fruit, such as grapefruit. During our trip to Gatlinburg last month, we hit the kitchen supply stores and they had this juicer on sale for $12.99, so I had to give it a try.

It works great, with a motor powerful enough that I can’t stall it when I grip the fruit tight against the reamer, of which it has two sizes. We had a couple of grapefruits, some kosher salt, and a bottle of gin and it had been a long time since my last Salty Dog. It was a salted glass rim, ice, 2oz gin, fill with juice, stir, enjoy - about one juicy grapefruit per drink - I had two grapefruit. :-)

Bev has been getting some good (for Tennessee) grapefruit at Kroger’s, so I’d better drink some more as the citrus season winds down. What a great way to get your daily dose of vitamin C – but I’m not telling you folks in Florida anything new. My dad had a home in Venice for a while with a few trees and I loved visiting in late winter and being able to go pick a grapefruit when I wanted one.  I went to the store and bought a big bag to juice - and a bag of oranges too.

I don't know about you, but I'm on bad-news overload.  I generally watch the morning and evening news shows on TV and read the majority of the two local papers.  I'm considering reading only the funnies, bridge, and working the puzzles in the papers and sticking to the Food Network, NCAA basketball, and Match Game reruns on TV - and juicing more grapefruit.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry

Almost Heaven South Via Google Earth

You've seen three of my five or six posts about smoked sausage and I figured you might want a break.

Betsy over at Joyful Reflections recently posted a Google Earth shot of a place they stayed during one of their trips and I loved the idea of doing it. I just copied the google shots and pasted in Word, then imported to my blog as I normally would any picture.  Please let me know if there is a better way.

I've often mentioned being in the woods and having a pasture across the road so here are a series of shots showing our Almost Heaven South.  Each shot gets further away, but our place stays in the middle and can be identified by the pasture.  Just click on each one to blow it up.

The first shot is a decent close up with the house in the center and woods on three sides, my garden plot to the left of the house (beside the road) and our dock down to the right with the green roof.  That dark spot in the middle of the driveway is the rock that shows up in some of my photos.

 

The next shot is further away and shows the houses across the road as well as more of the pasture (it's actually a pretty steep hill).  You can see what a great little secluded place our dock is in.

Even farther away and just keep an eye on the pasture to see where we are.

Still further away with a view of Tellico Lake.  There's more development across the lake than on our side.  The subdivision where Bev's sister lives is directly south of us - lower left corner of the same colored picture we're in.

I hope you've enjoyed your little fly over of Almost Heaven South and perhaps you can see why I call it that.  Now that you know where I live, if you have any devious activities planned - come well armed, because I am. :-)

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry

Smoking Link Sausage For The First Time

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY

Thanks to my Rytek Kutas sausage making book and some advice from Chez over at Fat Johnny’s Front Porch, I’d made it to the final step in the sausage process – smoking it. From what I understand, it’s important to keep the smoker temp at 160* because if it goes higher, the fat in the sausage will melt and run out yielding a less than desirable product.

My Stumps Smoker is a box shape which is good for hanging linked sausage – I didn’t want to lay it on the racks – so I removed the shelves, bought some 5/8” diameter wooden dowel rods, and cut them to the right length to fit the smoker. I have a device called a DigiQ for my smoker which is basically a thermometer and a fan (like our homes) that controls the internal temp. My concern was whether or not it could stay at the lower temps.

According to Rytek, the pit should be at 130* until the casings have dried and it has achieved a nice color, then it is slowly raised and smoke is introduced. This description works fine for a smoker designed for smoking sausage, which mine isn’t, so I have less control over the smoke amount.

I got the smoker to 130* and added the sausage - note only two probes, one for the smoker and one for the meat - a record low for me.

The book said to hold it at 130* for an hour, but after about 15 minutes, the temp started creeping up taking an hour to get to 147*, at which point I added a chunk of hickory and began easing the smoker temp up to 160*.  I had to trrottle the inlet air back to a very small opening to maintain the 160* pit temp, but the Stumps was able to do it - a windy, 30 degree day would have been a little easier.  Next time I may fuel it by adding a few lit coals as needed - but hey this is a first and I'm sure I'll learn alot from it.

The meat temp got up to 125* pretty quick, but then with an ever decreasing difference between the pit and the meat temps, it slowed way down (thermodynamics in action) - I'm kicking myself for not using Chris' cooking log - I'll remember it next time.  I put it on at 10am EDT and took it out at 5pm at an internal temp of 149* - big difference in the color.

Guess what I had for supper - leftover pasta with that good sauce and a piece of sausage with my homemade mustard.

I don't know why the shots turned out so bad and why it has the white streaks on it, but Bev and I both really liked it.  This is a big deal as she has told me on a regular basis that she doesn't like cased sausage - I now believe she'll support making more and help me eat it.  I've made this before and just smoked it as an uncased chub, but it's better stuffed into a casing.  I'm so pleased with this entire first try and I will definitely make, stuff, and smoke more - I feel a new stuffer coming on.

Coal companies aren't dumb - I've seen a flood of ads regarding coal to produce electricity since Japan's nuke problems happened.  Playing to our fears me thinks.

Have a good day and thanks for visiting.

Larry

My First Attempt At Stuffed Sausage

I’ve made sausage a fewl times but always as bulk and never stuffed into casings. Several folks on the forums and blogs I read are real sausage makers and I drool every time I see it. Awhile back, I bought a grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer that allows me to grind small meat batches myself. I’d still been debating about buying a good stuffer but was reluctant to buy one until I knew I wanted to do this, then I saw Mister Meatball using a stuffer attachment for his mixer to do it.

So I decided for the $15 cost of the stuffer attachment, I could take the plunge and give it a try knowing it would be more difficult as the auger feed must be kept full to avoid air pockets. I figured this would allow me to give it a try, see if I enjoy doing it and see if I like the product, knowing I can get better equipment later.

I like the Czech sausage I’ve made in the past, and the folks I get the spices from, stuff theirs and I assume since they add curing salt, they also smoke it. So for this batch, I used 4½ # each of venison and ground pork – since the venison was already ground, I just bought some ground pork from the local market. It’s the meat they make their breakfast sausage from and is fattier than just a ground pork butt. I’m not a meat expert but I believe I can tell the venison from the pork.

I mixed the meat then added half the spices, curing salt, and cold water.

Mixed again, added the remaining ingredients and mixed once more.

I then covered it and stuck in the fridge overnight to chill and have the flavors marry up well.

For the breakfast sausage, I had 3 ½ # of meat left and used the same spices as they use where I bought the meat.

I bought my natural hog casings from Your Sausage Source , put them in water and soaked overnight in the fridge. When ready to stuff, I flushed in cold water. Mister Meatball has a good pictorial step-by-step on his blog but here's my set up ready to go.

The first casing went well, except note the first few inches on the inside weren't full - I squeezed it to fix.

And the third and fourth casings went well, but we managed to let air get in during the second casing and that’s it on the right – it was breakfast the next day.

We decided to put a little of the breakfast sausage in the casing and that's it lower right.

Then it was time to link it and I made them big after discovering I had the casings stuffed full and they could blow out easily.

This is the full batch.
 

This was a real learning process and I found that it’s not difficult, but the kitchen aid stuffer makes it a slow two person process. I learned that if you get them too full, it’s hard to make the links without a blowout, and I learned the cooler the meat the better with this stuffer. Finally I learned that the clean up is the same, so make a big batch.  A positive - sausage making is like BBQing, you can eat the mistakes.  Tune back in for my first attempt at the smoking process.
 
Thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.
 
Larry

Sausage Trial For Breakfast

I made up two kinds of sausage the previous day and will made my first attempt at stuffing it into casings later this day – separate post tomorrow. After mixing, I put it in the fridge overnight for the flavors to marry and I gave it a try for breakfast. I just had your basic breakfast – pork breakfast sausage, pork and venison Czech sausage, two sunny-side up dippy eggs, and a piece of buttered garlic parmesan Italian toast.

I liked both sausages and was well fortified for the days activities.

Both of my basketball teams, West Virginia and Tennessee, have decent seeds in the NCAA Tournament, now I just hope one of them makes it past their second game.

While mowing the grass yesterday for the seasons first time, I noticed several dried cow piles in the yard.  I'm afraid they were carried there by the same canine mouth that likes to lick my face and occasionally my mouth.  Oh well it hasn't killed me yet.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry