Learning Something New

 Last night PH and I took advantage of his Christmas gift - a sausage making class .  I have never been a big fan of sausage but he loves it so I thought this might be a fun time for him. And I've discovered I didn't like sausage because I didn't like the standard breakfast sausage.  But this! Wow.  There is a sign on the wall of this shop:  If you want to cook good food you have to eat good food.  Right.  And if you are a good enough cook you can read a recipe and know whether it's going to taste good.

This class was completely hands on.  While the shop instructors had all the ingredients on hand we did all of the slicing, dicing, chopping, mixing.  There were twelve people and we were all involved.  Each doing a different task.

We learned two recipes.  Ours was scallion pancake flavor sausage and it had chopped garlic, shallot,  green onions (scallions) lemon grass, ginger, pork stock and hoisin sauce, salt, some green leaf thing I didn't know what it was but it was kaffir leaves, and the scallion pancake which we decided was really a pita bread with scallion baked in so easily substituted at home with pita and some extra scallion chopped in. 

The Mexican Street Corn sausage had salt, cayenne, cilantro, cojita cheese, lime, jalapeno, red onion, and corn stock.  Now I had never heard of corn stock but they said to cook down your corn cobs AND husks like you would any stock you make.  I can't wait for summer to try this!

We put the meat through the grinder, two sizes.  This was the first and larger grind then it was put through a smaller grind.

Next the seasoning is added and it's done either by hand at home or a mixer because you obviously don't want the seasonings to get caught in the grinder.

Then we stuff 'em.  This is trickier than you'd think.  The casings are slippery, we really couldn't use gloves because you really have to feel it.  

The casings are delicate and easily break if the pressure we exert on turning the crank is too much.  We all had breakage. 

We came home with three of each recipe, PH was till working on his scallion pancake sausage.

We all got to taste what we were making because the instructors cooked up some of each. They were both delicious!!!  The Mexican Street Corn had a kick to it as you would expect from the ingredients and the scallion pancake was amazing.  I just might actually like sausage AND found a new fun thing to make on our own.  The possibilities are endless.