Regional Thai Sausages

Last week, I somehow came to the conclusion that my very purpose in life was to bring the many joys of regional Thai sausages to the people of London. I’m not totally sure how I decided this but I just really love Thai sausages and making foods so it seemed like a relatively good idea. Past-lives may or may not have been mentioned in my many passionate pitches to friends and family on the subject. The main reactions varied between wary, “It’s going to be a lot harder than you think it is” “You can’t just ‘start making your own sausages! It doesn’t work like that” to humorous “You are absolutely mad” and just plain laughing in my face.

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.