Oops, I did it again...

SausageFest 2014 happened last weekend. 

It was glorious, we should have made shirts to commemorate the occasion... I guess spiced meats will have to do!

A friend of ours has the same sausage grinder that I do, and after careful deliberation over a bottle of wine one night, we decided that we should combine our respective talents into one massive day of meats. Again, glorious.

The day began at The Meat Shop in Phoenix where we picked up some choice cuts (for grinding, so not the speedy stuff) to play with. I also raided my chest freezer for some goodies. We had: beef chuck, pork (loin tip and blade roast), lamb, veal, and chicken thighs.

We went to the downtown phoenix market for some herbs and lemons and then headed home for the fun.

We set one grinder for coarse and the other for fine and we went to town grinding ALL THE MEATS!! 

Truth be told, it was pretty ridiculous.

Trevor, me, and Chris has the most efficient system going. We were all in the zone. 

We even cased a bunch of sausages for a new twist on my old game.

Of course, we tested each recipe before we committed it to the case.

All said, we made: 

Spicy Italian chicken sausage

Fennel and apple chicken sausage

Koobideh (lamb)

Gyro (lamb)

Spicy Italian pork sausage

Wheatless Veal meatballs with flax and pine nuts

Chorizo

 I'll post a recipe or two from this adventure in madness soon.

Jimmy Dean, meet Jenny Dub (and Trevor)

We've matched your meat, sir...

For Christmas, Santa got me the meat grinder attachment for my mixer. It hasn't left its box. Truth be told, I was really intimidated by the contraption. What if I don't choose the right meat to grind? What will I make? Don't I also need the sausage stuffer attachment if I want to make sausage??

Then I remembered: It's just food.  If I mess it up, I can probably still eat it.  And if it does all go to pot, no one has to know, right?  Right.

In a previous post, I hinted that I buy lots of food.  I'm what you might call a food hoarder.  The only reason I'm not actually one, is that I eventually use the food.  But it's true, I do buy a ridiculous amount of food.  The redeeming part of this is that I always shop sales and specials. I almost never pay full price, especially for meat, dairy and eggs.

See all those eggs?  All that milk? That was just the first trip to the store... They're on sale aaalllllllll week!

Specials like this usually end up shaping my menu for the week. So when I found a 3lb beef bottom round roast for $2.50/lb I jumped on that really quickly!

It made its home in my fridge for a few days next to a pork blade roast that I had snagged for about $2/lb.

So the next logical step (since they became friends) was to make SAUSAGE!!

First, chop the meat into chunks. I had about 3 lb of each.

Then grind it all together in the fancy brand new meat grinder!

Season to taste. This got complicated... I may have divided my 6lb of ground meat into 4 different batches because I couldn't choose just one seasoning style. 

So I had: breakfast sausage (nutmeg, salt, cinnamon, pepper), steak (Montreal steak seasoning), Mexican hot pepper (pepper purée I had made previously, a chopped up jalapeño, salt, red chile flakes, and cayenne pepper), and Italian (rosemary, basil, oregano, garlic)

Make sure to test them before finishing so you know they're delicious. In fact, test it twice to make doubly sure!

I didn't have casing, so I just made bulk sausage and cooked it up as patties.

What's your favorite spice blend in meat?