Yesterday was spent trying to create 3 master recipes for 3 kinds of Thai sausage. A good portion of it was also spent close to tears and lying on the floor in pain. I don’t know why I was so adamant in thinking I possessed some unused sausage-making gift, able to dismiss anyone’s concerns of how tricky it would be with unashamed confidence and belief. It is really, really tricky to make sausages. It is even more tricky to make sausages with an empty water bottle sawn in half and an upside-down wooden spoon. Pretty much impossible, actually. I made 4 links in an hour and a half and felt like I was about to die. 4 Ibroprufen, 2 Bloody Mary’s and a Kitchen Aid sausage stuffing attachment later, things were sort of looking up. After half of a horribly frustrating hour trying to manually stuff sausages using the Kitchen Aid attachment with the mixer turned OFF I finally realised (was told) that it actually works better if you turn it on. It got a lot easier after that. Although it was still by no means a breeze, and I possess no sausage-making gift whatsoever. I suck. The whole thing (12 sausages) took 5 hours, then a further 2 hours de-porking kitchen, Kitchen Aid and myself.
But my sausages were pretty good! They were far too fat, some split, they were a little dry and I’ve learnt that when you put 15 cloves of garlic in anything you need to cook it really, really well. But they tasted alright! Not 7 hours of slaving in the kitchen fantastic. But pretty good considering some people I spoke to prior to doing it seemed to think stuffing mince meat into intestines and not causing some kind of serious disaster was impossible. I did it! And my first sausages are my babies and I am that irritating parent in the schoolyard going on about how perfect and lovely their genius children are when actually everyone else can see they are horrible, thick, snotty nosed bullies. But they are mine and I love them.
… Although I would happily not see another one for a good few weeks, and I still have 4lb of meat left.